


Zum Auge Gottes

by lesmisloony



Category: Mozart l'Opéra Rock - Mozart/Baguian & Guirao
Genre: Crossdressing, Dancer Cameos, F/F, Gay And On The Floor, Love Triangle, M/M, Secret 18th Century Gay Club, Sneaky Claire OC, everybody has issues, nobody is straight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2018-11-17 02:09:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 46,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11265771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesmisloony/pseuds/lesmisloony
Summary: Nannerl moves to Vienna after the death of her father to be near Constance and Wolfgang, the only family she has left.  While boarding with the Webers, she begins to suspect something more is going on in the old house, and that Constance's enigmatic sister Aloysia is right at the center of it.  Constance, meanwhile, just wants her husband to get his act together.  Now that the court Kapellmeister has died, is there any chance the emperor will choose Wolfgang to fill the position instead of his pet favorite, Antonio Salieri?





	1. Banlieue nord

**Author's Note:**

> Look, this is MOR and I'm allowed to ignore some historical facts, right? Right. Good, thank you, enjoy 18th-century lesbian Starmania.

The carriage ride from Salzburg to Vienna was the first time in her life she'd ever been truly alone.

She didn't mind too much at first.  In fact, that first morning was exhilarating, accepting the driver's hand and stepping up into the carriage knowing that this could be the last time her feet were on Salzburg soil, that she was finally heading off into her future, into an adult life where only she had a voice in what decisions she made.  All the servants she had known since she was a child were lined up in the drive to watch her leave, the old housekeeper even dashing tears away from her eyes.  Nannerl only allowed herself to look back at them for a moment, for the time it took the driver to check that her trunk was secured and the horses were ready.  She waved one last time, closed the door, and dropped into her seat, positively trembling with excitement.

But it had been so long since those days that she had traveled Europe with her family, with Wolfgang.  She hadn't realized just how long the journey to Vienna would be, and how long it would feel when there was no one to talk to!  For the first two days, she busied herself by answering the correspondence that had piled up in that murky week following the death of her father.  Condolence after condolence, none of them from names she even recognized.  That had been her father's realm, slipping easily through crowded concert halls, tipping his hat at just the right moment, unfamiliar names falling from his lips like the words to a foreign song.  Just enough flattery, just enough vanity, just enough to open the right doors, to secure the right positions, to play for the right ears.  If only he had had more time to teach this art to his daughter!  But he was gone now, and Nannerl would have to find her own way forward.  She answered each letter as personally as she could, tailoring the words of gratitude to the melody set down by the writer, and had a few dozen ready to be posted when the carriage stopped each night.

By the fourth day, all the correspondence had been answered and the velvet interior of the carriage was starting to feel like the inside of her father's coffin.  That night, she told the driver as sweetly as she could that she would absolutely go mad if they didn't reach Vienna within a day.  He had fortunately been amused: instead of stabling the horses for the night and checking into an inn, he had had them swapped for a fresh pair and opened the carriage door to her once more, bowing as Nannerl climbed back inside with a groan.

They reached the capital the next afternoon.  Days of monotony vanished into memory as she pressed her face to the carriage window, tilting her head this way and that in an attempt to watch both the rambling old buildings and the crowds of pedestrians that were pressing around them, a symphony of conversation and fine frocks.  The last time she had been here had been with her father, of course, the protective shadow that fell over all of her memories.  It had been just after Wolfgang married Constance, a friendly visit that hadn't lasted nearly long enough. This time, she had come to Vienna for herself.  Maybe even for her music.

The Webers' boarding house was in a quieter corner of town, where the people and the buildings stood less straight, where the cobbles and silks shone less brightly.  An old church haunted the corner, its windows boarded over, tiles missing from its roof.  Beyond that stood the house, its name painted on the sign that hung over the door:  _Zum Auge Gottes_.  God's Eye.

The driver reigned the horses at last; Nannerl quickly slipped her shoes back onto her feet and straightened her hair, pinning her hat back into place before she took her first steps into Vienna.  Her first steps as a free woman, as an adult.

The door of the boarding house flew open and a voice shrieked, "She's here!  Wolfi, she's here!" before Nannerl had even clambered out of the carriage.  By the time she was on the ground, her sister-in-law had caught her in a tight hug, nearly lifting her right back into the air.  "Oh, thank goodness!" she sighed, "Thank goodness you came!  Maybe you can talk some sense into him."

"Good to see you too, Constance," she said, her voice a little raspy from disuse.  She looked up expectantly at the open door, but only saw the backside of the driver as he lugged her trunk inside.  "How is my brother?"

"How he always is," came the grumbled response.

On the highest floor of the boarding house, Nannerl saw one of the curtains twitch.  She shielded her eyes against the orange light of the sunset and stared, hoping to catch Wolfgang's eye and beckon him downstairs.  It had been years since last they had seen each other!  But for the brief moment when the curtains were parted, the sliver of face they revealed was not that of her brother.  Even from this distance, she could feel the weight of a fiery stare.  The hairs on her arms prickled as she tried to see who was watching them, watching her.  She saw a dark eye, a fine nose, a slender arm--and then the person turned away and the curtain fell closed again.  

Without lowering her gaze, Nannerl asked, "Has your mother got any other boarders in?"

"Just us Webers," Constance sighed.  "Every week Wolfgang declares that we'll be gone by the weekend, and every weekend he says he'll find us something in the coming week.  I've long since put our trunks away."

"I've noticed his letters have taken a... turn," Nannerl said carefully.  "What has he done since they canceled Figaro?  Is he up there concocting something new?"

Constance rolled her eyes, threading her arm through Nannerl's and leading her into the boarding house.  "Just a hangover, usually."

Frau Weber was in the parlor when the two of them stepped in, her fists on her hips while she watched Nannerl's driver tug her trunk up the staircase.  She was just as Nannerl remembered her, frazzled blond curls and a round, pinched face.  She threw out her arms to greet the guest, nearly knocking Constance over as she rushed to embrace her.  "Fraulein Mozart!"

"Frau Weber," she replied, grinning as Constance righted herself and shot a sulky look at her mother.

"You've arrived just in time for dinner, you clever girl!" she gushed.  "Come on, come to the table!"

"Oh, but I've been traveling all day, I should like to-"

"Eat first!" Frau Weber interrupted.  "This evening we can draw you a bath!"

The offer was too good to resist.  Constance took Nannerl's cloak and hat upstairs while Frau Weber led her into the dining room.  The parlor was shadowy, with cracked porcelain tiles on the floor and sloping, dingy walls, but in the dining room there still lingered hints that the God's Eye had once been a fine old house.  The ceiling was higher here, the floorboards were even, and three arched windows afforded a view of the darkening sky and the street below.  The other Weber sisters were already at the table, though Sophie sprang to her feet when she saw Nannerl, nearly upsetting a candlestick in her excitement.  Josepha was more contained, merely rising and nodding her head. 

Frau Weber took a seat at the head of the table, gesturing for Nannerl to sit by her side.  Across from her was an empty chair.  Nannerl remembered Constance saying that there were no boarders and quickly counted the empty plates waiting at the table: once Constance and Wolfgang joined them, one empty seat would still remain.  

With a guilty glance at her mother, Sophie slipped out of her chair and into the one at Nannerl's side, still beaming at her.  "Fraulein Mozart," she said, "we know all about you!  They say you were once a great musician too, even greater than Wolfgang!"

"They also say your father forced you to stop playing when you reached a marriageable age," added Josepha, rolling her eyes.

"And yet, you refused to marry!"

"Girls, let her breathe!" their mother scolded, leaning across the table to serve Nannerl a chunk of grayish meat.

Sophie fell back into her seat and dropped her gaze to her lap.

Constance joined them a moment later, bringing with her apologies on behalf of Wolfgang, who wasn't feeling well enough to come to the table.  She accepted with a relieved sigh when Nannerl offered to visit him in his room later, though there was still something disconcerting about the shadow in his wife's eyes whenever she mentioned him.  Nannerl picked at the dinner, trying to eat enough so as to not appear ungrateful despite the strange feeling in her stomach.  She wasn't sure if it was spending the better part of a week cooped up in a carriage by herself that was getting to her, or if she was just worried about her brother.

None of her hosts made anything of her silence.  In fact, Sophie's enthusiasm had been rekindled when Constance joined them, and the two of them were brightly going over a list of museums and parks that Nannerl would have to see now that she was to be a Viennese citizen.  Then they began naming important people at court to whom she would have to be introduced.  They seemed to have listed every duke, count, and lord in the empire before Frau Weber finally cut them off with, "Alright, that's enough of that!" and turned her beady stare on Nannerl.  "Tell us, Fraulein Mozart," she said.  "Ignoring my fanciful daughters, what is that you are hoping to find here in Vienna?"

Nannerl gestured to her mouth, pretending to chew much longer than necessary.  What was she hoping to find in Vienna?  What was she hoping to make of herself now that her father was gone, now that there was no one left to make her doubt herself, to remind her of her place?  It was the same question that she had been pushing away since first she decided to leave Salzburg.  If she hadn't been able to find an answer during those five monotonous days in the carriage, one was unlikely to spring to mind at this unfamiliar table, under the curious gazes of the entire Weber family.

But at that moment she was rescued when the dining room door slid open and, for the space between two heartbeats, the world seemed to stop.  A woman stood in the doorway, candlelight dancing softly across her perfect features, her arms slightly raised, her shoulders back and her head held high.  She lifted her chin, scanning the family with a naturally mournful gaze until her eye met Nannerl's.  This was the person she had seen in the upstairs window, Nannerl realized.  And when Frau Weber pushed back her chair and said, "Ah, Fraulein, you haven't met my Aloysia!" it all made sense.

Aloysia Weber, now Aloysia Lange, the famous soprano, the woman for whom Wolfgang had nearly thrown away his career when he was younger.  Seeing her for the first time, Nannerl finally understood why.  She seemed to glide into the room, still holding Nannerl's gaze as she spoke in a delicate voice, "Good evening, Fraulein."

"Fraulein," Nannerl answered, abruptly rising to her feet.

Aloysia slipped into the chair that faced hers, forgoing the dinner and simply pouring herself a glass of wine.  A smirk was playing at the corners of her mouth.

Nannerl dropped back into her seat.  Her appetite had been weak before; now it was completely gone.  Aloysia seemed to shimmer before her, lifting her glass in one elegant hand and raising it to her well-shaped lips, every inch of her the perfect porcelain doll.  She tore her gaze away long enough to prod at her food, but couldn't bear to take another bite.  Maybe the voyage had driven her mad.

"You know, Fraulein Mozart," Aloysia said, glancing up at her from beneath her long lashes, "ever since your brother told me about you I've been dying to meet you."

Her melodic voice seemed to settle right in the pit of Nannerl's stomach.  "Please, let's- you can call me Nannerl," she stammered.  "Everyone does."

"Nannerl," Aloysia repeated, and suddenly the name was sharp enough to draw blood.  Her lips curled into a smile.  "And you will call me Aloysia."

Aloysia!  If ever anyone deserved such an ornate name, it was her.

"Aloysia has been staying with us until those idiot managers at the Burgtheater come to their senses and renegotiate her salary," clucked Frau Weber, plopping a piece of the meat onto her daughter's plate and gesturing sternly at it.  "As much as Herr Lange travels, she couldn't bear the thought of staying alone in that old house out in the country!  Isn't that right, dear?"

Aloysia ran one of her long fingers across the rim of her wine glass, still holding Nannerl's gaze as she said, "I do hate to be alone." 

One of the other sisters giggled and Nannerl flushed, nearly dropping her fork. 

The conversation moved on after that, leaving both Aloysia and Nannerl where they were.  Josepha began recounting a story of something Wolfgang's librettist had said the last time he stopped by the house which had been so charming she had almost swooned; Sophie volunteered some scandalous rumor about what that same librettist had gotten up to when he lived in Italy.  At the far end of the table, Constance was eating quietly, her eyes on her plate.

The lighthearted chatter became a roar in Nannerl's ears.  She took a tiny bite of her dinner, then glanced up to find that Aloysia was still watching her, sipping slowly at her wine and ignoring the meat her mother had put in front of her.  She didn't turn away when Nannerl met her gaze.

Unsure what to think, she shifted in her seat and cleared her throat.

Unfortunately, doing so interrupted the conversation.

"Fraulein Mozart, you poor thing," Frau Weber cooed, "you must be exhausted!  And here we sit, gossiping about the court and your brother's associates without even a thought for what you've been through these past weeks!"

"I- I hope you won't think me rude if I retire for the evening," Nannerl said quickly, seizing the opportunity to clear her head.

"And we promised you a bath, didn't we?  Constance, show our guest to her room!  Sophie, Josepha, if you would draw some water-"

"I'll show her," Aloysia volunteered, returning her glass to the table.  "Let Constance finish her dinner."

"But Aloysia, you haven't even touched your sausage."

"I don't want it," she shrugged.  She rose from her seat in a fluid motion that made her seem more like a fairy than a woman. 

Nannerl did the same, drifting to the door after Aloysia Lange in a sort of daze.  "Thank you again for your hospitality, Frau Weber," she said.

If Frau Weber answered, Nannerl didn't hear.

She followed Aloysia out of the dining room, across the parlor and up the well-worn staircase.  Her host didn't say anything further, didn't bother with pleasantries, which was for the best as all Nannerl could hear at that particular moment was the drumbeat of her pulse and the crashing cymbals of her thoughts.  Once they reached the third floor, Aloysia held open a door at the far side of the landing, her heavy gaze tracking Nannerl as she slipped past her.  It was a modest room, hardly more than a cubby tucked beneath a sloping ceiling and a dormer window with one cracked pane.  Her trunk was waiting on a narrow cot, her hat and cloak resting neatly atop it.  For some reason, the familiar sight of her things made Nannerl let out a long sigh.

Aloysia leaned against the open door, her arms crossed.  "My room is right next door," she said.  Was there really a glint in her eye, or was Nannerl so exhausted she was imagining things?  No wonder Wolfgang had almost ruined his career over this woman!  And Nannerl was supposed to be the rational one.

"And- and Wolfgang?"

The coy smile slipped off of Aloysia's face for the first time since she had arrived in the dining room.  "You'll find the maestro downstairs," she said, impatience coloring her voice.  "Though he may not be up to a visitor quite yet."

"What do you mean by that?" asked Nannerl.

But Aloysia didn't seem to want to talk about Wolfgang.  She took a step into the room and extended one arm to tuck an errant curl behind Nannerl's ear, smirking when Nannerl started at her touch.  

"I should- I should call on my brother," Nannerl murmured; she didn't realize that she was leaning into Aloysia's touch until the hand moved away and she nearly lost her balance.

"As you wish," said Aloysia.  Now she was definitely staring at Nannerl's mouth.  Her gaze drifted down to her neckline, then to her hands, before she suddenly said, "If you can think of anything you want tonight, don't forget: I'm right next door."  And then she withdrew, only a shaft of moonlight in the doorway where she had been.

Nannerl put a hand against the wall to steady herself.  

Life without her father's guidance was already proving to be a lot more confusing than she had anticipated.


	2. Un garçon pas comme les autres

Constance shot another anxious glance at the closed door, and was punished for it when she accidentally pricked her finger with her needle.  She cried out and dropped Wolfgang's jacket to the floor in surprise.  The ripped seam gaped open, almost like the ugly old thing was mocking her.  She kicked it against the far wall.

What was Nannerl saying to Wolfgang in there?  Would she be able to bring back his fire, his focus?  

She slumped back on the divan, then flopped onto her side.  Her mother had warned her when all this began that Wolfgang would be married to his music first, and to Constance second.  They had already seen it with Aloysia.  But he was older now, wiser, Constance had argued.  And he loved her!  Or, he said he loved her.  Things had been so good then!  He had never tried to hide her from his uppity colleagues, that was the nicest thing.  Wolfgang had invited Constance to every rehearsal in those days, had flirted with her and kissed her right under the gentlemen's noses.  She had felt like an urchin at the king's table the first time she had stood backstage at the Burgtheater in her hand-me-down dress, actors and singers blinking at her suspiciously over their librettos.  But Wolfgang had been there with his cheeky grin, and had grabbed her and kissed her in front of them all.  The memory of that stuffy little count Rosenberg's horror made her smile even now, even after everything that had happened since Figaro.

Nannerl would make the difference, Constance told herself, rolling off the divan and retrieving the ripped jacket.  Wolfgang talked all the time about the games he and his sister had played when they were younger, side by side before the clavichord, building duets that increased in speed and difficulty until one of them hit a foul note.  Their father would appear in the doorway then, giggles dying on the children's lips when he sent Nannerl out of the room so Wolfgang could continue practicing.  But their father wasn't here to stop them anymore.  With Nannerl at his side and his father in his grave, nothing would ever stop Wolfgang Mozart again.

She stabbed her needle into Wolfgang's jacket so carelessly that she very nearly pricked herself again.  Like all her sisters, she had been given singing lessons when she was a child, though she had never really taken to music the way Josepha and Aloysia had.  Maybe that was the secret.  Maybe if she spoke music like Aloysia, like Nannerl, she wouldn't feel her husband slipping away from her.  Maybe then she would know the words--the song--that would reach him.

She had finished repairing the jacket and was debating whether she should stoke the fire or let it die down when Nannerl finally emerged from the bedchamber, her expression almost as troubled as it had been when she'd gone in.  She managed a smile when she saw Constance, at least, twisting her damp hair over her shoulder.

"So?  How did you find him?" Constance asked, already knowing what the answer would be.

Nannerl merely rolled her eyes.

"But he was happy to see you, wasn't he?"

"I suppose so.  But you were right nonetheless.  I can't tell if he's more upset about losing Father or his Figaro."

"Things will be better now that you're here," Constance assured her, trying not to wince at how naive she sounded even to her own ears.

But Nannerl didn't seem to be listening.  She had been reaching for the door when she stopped, her arm outstretched, fingertips grazing the latch.

"What is it?"

She turned back and cast a furtive glance at the bedchamber door.  She dropped her voice to a whisper: "Can I ask you something?"

"Of course," Constance said, leaning forward conspiratorially. 

"About your sister."

"Which one?"

Nannerl tugged self-consciously at the sash of her housecoat.  "About... Aloysia.  Did- did she return Wolfgang's affection?"

"What, in Mannheim?  That was years ago!"

"I know," said Nannerl.  "It's foolish.  I only wondered-"

"You want to know if she's staying here to be near him, and if her presence is what's put Wolfgang off.  Is that it?"

"Well-"

"Believe me," Constance interrupted, "Wolfgang has nothing to fear from Aloysia!  She's barely even glanced at him since we moved back in."

"Because she's so devoted to her husband?" Nannerl asked cautiously.

Constance couldn't help but laugh.  "Aloysia?  Hardly."

Nannerl nodded, pensive.  "Well," she said, "I thank you for receiving me this late, in any case.  I'll see you in the morning."

Constance sprang to her feet and hastened to open the door for her sister-in-law, watching warmly as she drifted across the landing and mounted the staircase to the third floor.  Poor Nannerl, to travel so far after losing her father only to find Wolfgang still in one of his moods! 

Things would be better now, Constance told herself again as she put out the fire and began extinguishing the candles she had lit to accommodate their guest.  Maybe Wolfgang would even spring out of bed in the morning as he had once done, a new melody nearly spilling out of him in the time it took him to rush over to his desk and unstop the inkwell.  Maybe he would throw on his coat and take a coach to the palace again, rubbing shoulders with the great musicians in the employ of the emperor as he had once done.  If anyone could bring out his smile, could bring back the man who had loved her, it was Nannerl.  Tomorrow would be the beginning of a new chapter in their lives.

But tomorrow did not come as quickly as she had expected.

Constance was awakened in the middle of the night by a sharp thud and a whispered swear from her husband.

She sat up in bed, straining her eyes against the dark.  "Wolfi?"

"Blast-!  Constance?  Go back to sleep!" he hissed.  She could just make out the shape of him over by the wardrobe.

"But... what are you doing?"

"I- I have to-"

He was dressed, that much she could see.  He was dressed and halfway to the door.  "Oh, Wolfi, wherever you go at night, can't you bring me along, just this once?" she asked, clambering up onto her knees and clasping her hands.  "I won't scold you or tease you, I promise!"

Even in the dark, she could tell that he was gaping at her.  "I don't know if you'd enjoy yourself, Constance."

"Well, I won't let on if I don't!  I'll laugh and smile and be the most charming wife anyone has ever seen!"

He stared for another moment, then asked, "If I leave without you...?"

"I'll sit here and weep for the rest of the night!" she threatened.

"Don't- no, Constance, don't do that, don't joke about it."  He turned back to the wardrobe and began tossing garments at her.  "But you'll have to wear my clothes if you come.  It's not the sort of place where people bring their wives."

"Ooh," she said, sorting through the dark breeches, waistcoat, and shift he had given her.  "Can I wear the coat with the leopard spots?  Can my name be Conrad?"

He chuckled, withdrawing a pair of black masks from the back of the wardrobe.  "Believe me, Stanzi, no one will ask you for your name."

It was the closest thing she'd seen to his old smile in ages.

Several minutes later they were sneaking their way through the empty streets, stepping lightly and sticking close to buildings.  It was the most excitement Constance had felt since their wedding night.  Wolfgang moved quickly, sure of the way he must have taken dozens of times before, only looking over his shoulder at her once or twice.  It wasn't easy to keep up, especially with his borrowed breeches bunching between her thighs and a mask obscuring the corners of her vision.  If Wolfgang hadn't held her at an arm's length on the stoop of the God's Eye, looked her up and down, and whispered, "My god, you look amazing!" she would have thought that he was trying to lose her in this crumbling maze of back alleys.

Wolfgang stopped before a low wooden door and seized Constance's arm.  She took note of the way he looked her over appreciatively again, straightening the tricorn that hid her long hair, before he said, "We can still go back.  Aren't you tired?"

"Tired?  After all this?"

He shot a nervous look at the wooden door.  "If- if you lose track of me, you can wait in the antechamber by the coats, alright?  And if anyone approaches you-"

"I'm Conrad," she said, trying to make her voice as husky as possible.

Wolfgang seemed startled, but she glimpsed a little smile under his mask.  He cupped her hand in his cheek and her heartbeat stuttered.

But no sooner had he touched her than Wolfgang turned away, knocking at the heavy door and whispering something in Latin.  A masked man opened it, shadowed eyes skipping from Wolfgang to Constance, and he stepped aside for them to enter.  As they crossed the antechamber, Constance began to hear the incongruous sounds of a party in this strange place: the hollow tune of a fiddle in a cavernous room, the shuffle of many pairs of feet, whoops, jeers, and the clink of glassware.

Their host took their cloaks and opened a second door, and suddenly they were right in the middle of it.

The ballroom was ornate and sparkling, though only half of the candles in the chandelier were lit, casting ominous shadows over the masked assembly as they spun around the floor.  She clapped her hands in delight.  So all these nights when she had rolled over and found herself in an empty bed, Wolfgang had been here, at a party?  She had begun to suspect the worst, that he had a lover tucked away somewhere in a seedy corner of town, and that after spending every night in her arms there was no more room in his heart for Constance.  But he had been here, drinking and dancing with these joyous strangers all along!  She could have cried from relief.

Wolfgang squeezed her shoulder and released her, and just like that he had been swept up in the current of the dancers.  She stood alone for a long moment, searching the crowd for his lavender coat, when she noticed something strange.

Amidst all the pastel silks and ornate embroidery, there was not a single skirt anywhere in the room.  Cravats hung at every neck.  She crouched, pretending to dust off her shoe, and scanned the crowd again from below.  Stockings and breeches everywhere, a forest of shapely calves.  With the exception of Constance herself, everyone at the party appeared to be a man.

Of course, a salon filled with boisterous gentleman was nothing new, to be sure.  Even back in Mannheim, she had often seen her father closing the parlor door against his family while he and his friends smoked foul cigars and gambled an evening away.  What  _was_ strange was that these men weren't smoking and gambling: they were dancing.  They were dancing with each other, arms around waists, masked cheek against cheek, hands clasped, foreheads pressed together.  She caught sight of Wolfgang's jacket at the far side of the room already.  He had joined hands with a chain of dancers, all of them winding their way around the room and laughing.  She lowered her mask without thinking, the sound of Wolfgang's silly giggle filling her heart.  So this was what Aloysia had been talking about: an English molly-house, right here in Vienna.

But did Wolfgang come here for a break from all of the women in the Weber house?  Or was he here because...?

At the edge of the room, Wolfgang broke away from the chain, the men on either side of him joining hands and cavorting away.  Constance pushed her hat back and squinted as a tall figure dressed in black approached her husband, looking down at him through a glowering mask.  Wolfgang looked relaxed at least, though the stranger seemed so uptight she half expected that he was going to arrest Wolfgang on the spot.  They stared at each other for a long moment; finally, Wolfgang took the man by one hand and pulled him away from the dancers, through a side door and out of sight.

"Frau Mozart?"

She recoiled at the sound of her name, clapping her mask back over her face though she had already been seen.

A nervous-looking man had broken away from the crowd, lowering his own mask so that she would recognize him: Gottlieb Stephanie, Wolfgang's former librettist.  "Frau Mozart," he hissed, "what are you doing here?  You really-"

"I came with Wolfgang," she said, glancing to the closed door at the far side of the room.  "But he... I think he left."

Herr Stephanie followed her gaze, brows lifting.  "Oh, oh dear.  I should- Please, Frau Mozart, allow me to escort you home.  Your husband... well!  We'll speak to him."

Resigned, Constance allowed herself to be led back out to the antechamber, where the masked attendant retrieved their cloaks.  At least Herr Stephanie had a carriage waiting around the corner, saving her the indignity of trudging back to the God's Eye alone in her husband's clothes as dawn threaded through the sky.


	3. Travesti

Nannerl's first full day in Vienna was not what she expected.

She had breakfast with the Webers--or rather, with half of the Webers: Constance and Wolfgang hadn't risen yet, and Frau Weber made it clear that Aloysia was never up before lunch.  She helped with the washing up despite her host's good-natured protests, then followed Sophie and Josepha on a walking tour of the neighborhood.  Once she had seen the streets of listless tenements and another angle of the caving-in church, Frau Weber took her to lunch at a friend's parlor, where she was introduced to a brigade of unimpressed faces whose noses had already turned up at the name Mozart.  The day managed to somehow be simultaneously tedious and a blur.  She amused herself by trying to think what her father would have done, which hands he would have kissed, which names he would have dropped.  She wasn't sure if she made a very good Leopold, but at least the vain merchants' wives and the pampered singers to whom Frau Weber had introduced her were smiling and complimenting her by the time they took their leave.  If she could work her way up to powerful enough connections here in Vienna, perhaps a path forward would define itself too.

The rest of the family joined them for dinner that night, though between them there was enough tension in the air to turn Nannerl's stomach.  Sophie prattled away as usual, bless her, with the occasional interruption by Josepha or her mother, but Constance was pale and silent, stirring her broth slowly and never lifting any to her lips.  At her side, Wolfgang ate quickly without raising his eyes from his bowl.  The two of them might as well have been in a different room from the rest of the family.

As for Aloysia... well, she had positioned herself across from Nannerl again, looking up from beneath her lashes and holding her gaze whenever she got the chance, that same glint in her expression, that same smirk on her perfect lips.  When she finished her broth, she went so far as to run a finger across the edge of her bowl, catch Nannerl's eye, and then slowly slide it into her mouth.  

Nannerl bit back a smile and shifted in her seat, her heartbeat accelerating suddenly and her cheeks burning.  Was there any doubt now that Aloysia was doing this on purpose?  Apparently it hadn't been enough for Nannerl to toss about in bed the night before, wondering if Aloysia had meant to look at her that way, had meant to insinuate that Nannerl should come to her room during the night.  Apparently, she wouldn't be satisfied unless it happened again tonight.  Apparently she wanted to drive her mad.

She finished off her glass of water before she dared to look up at her again, catching her lower lip between her teeth when she met that icy gaze.  This time, Aloysia winked at her.

The heat from Nannerl's cheeks spread through the rest of her body.  She glanced around the table to confirm that everyone was either sulking at their soup or caught up in conversation, lifted her spoon, and licked it as slowly as she could, staring Aloysia down.

Those perfectly-arched brows shot up, and for the first time Aloysia's smirk spread into a grin.

At least there wasn't any more room for doubt after that.

As the dinner was wrapping up she felt her pulse accelerate, her thoughts racing.  What would happen now, now that they both knew what the other was thinking?  Would she hear a gentle knock at her door once the house had gone to sleep?  There was something particularly bizarre about imagining herself sneaking into the room of a woman her brother had once loved while he slept downstairs in the arms of his wife.  The fact that Aloysia's mother's room was directly below hers didn't help matters either. 

And yet the thought of it was a little exciting.

But as they were clearing the table, a guest arrived at the house: a woman in a simple dress with round, dark eyes and a strong jaw.  Aloysia hastened to greet her, kissing both of her cheeks and leading her into the parlor.  When Nannerl caught Sophie's eye and whispered, "Who was she?" the youngest sister merely rolled her eyes and said, "Aloysia always has company in the evenings."

Did she?  She hadn't had company last night, had she?  But then, Nannerl had spent a long time in the bath, and had then gone down to talk with poor Wolfgang.  Aloysia may well have received a guest while she was upstairs and she never would have known.

When three more women arrived, and then a fifth, all of them filing into the parlor and closing the door behind them, Nannerl wasn't sure if she should be relieved or jealous.  Dinner had been cleared away and Frau Weber had brought out the wine left over from the previous night, pouring drinks for her family and spinning a thick web of gossip from which none of the people she had met earlier in the day were spared.  Nannerl lingered, hoping that Aloysia would appear in the doorway and invite her to come meet her guests, but the only disturbance in their evening was when Wolfgang interrupted a story poor Sophie was telling by standing up, stretching his arms, and announcing that he was going to bed.  He kissed Nannerl's temple as he passed her, then lingered by the door and asked, "Constance?  Aren't you coming?"

For the first time that evening, Constance's eyes lit up as she sprang to her feet and hurried out of the room after her husband.

Nannerl grinned.  One piece of advice she had given Wolfgang the night before had been to stop taking his wife for granted, to appreciate that he had someone who loved him and who wanted to share his life with him.  He had spent most of their conversation sulkily doodling on an old composition, but when she had said that she had seen something change in her brother's expression.  Maybe he had actually listened to her for once.

Nannerl excused herself not long after.  She bade Frau Weber and her two remaining daughters a good night, then slipped out of the dining room and closed the door behind her.  To her right was the staircase; to her left, the closed parlor door behind which Aloysia had disappeared with her guests.  She turned toward the stairs, shooting a dark look in the direction of the parlor, but something stopped her.  She would go upstairs in a moment, but first... first she had to give in to her curiosity, if only for a moment. Nannerl held her breath and crept toward the parlor door, her skirts gathered in her fists and all her slight weight on her toes.  She pressed an ear against it, waiting: what would Aloysia and her guests be talking about?  Would they all be complaining about their husbands?  Were they all singers at odds with the managers of the Burgtheater?  Would they be gossiping about their acquaintances as venomously as Frau Weber?

But from within she heard nothing.  No laughter, no hum of conversation, not even the creaking of furniture.  But she had seen half a dozen women go into this room!  What could they possibly be up to that would result in such perfect silence?

She suddenly realized that her fingertips were resting on the latch.  Did she dare try to investigate?  What if she opened the door and those six beautiful faces turned toward her, their eyes as hard as the snobs with whom she had lunched earlier in the day?  What if Aloysia was outraged at her audacity and never met her eye again over dinner?  She started to lower her arm, to turn away, but she couldn't bear the thought of going up to bed without knowing what these women were doing--what Aloysia was doing.

If they were just on the other side of the door, she could tell them that she had taken a wrong turn, or that she had merely wished to bid Aloysia a good night as well.  It was a little brash, but perhaps they would brush it off by turning their noses up at the stranger from Salzburg who had yet to learn Viennese manners.

She had to know.

With a deep breath, Nannerl opened the door and stepped into the room, bracing herself for sneers and unkind stares.  But the room was empty.

She stood frozen for a moment, her eyes casting about the corners of the old parlor.  It was built like the dining room, with paneled walls and windows overlooking the abandoned church next door.  Several chairs were gathered into a circle in the middle of the floor, but no one was sitting in those chairs.  Aloysia and all her guests had simply vanished.

But that was foolish!  They had to have gone somewhere, and she hadn't seen them leave.  The dining room where she had been sitting with the rest of the family overlooked the street.  None of the people who had gone into this parlor had left the God's Eye at any point in the evening, or she would have seen it.

So where had they gone?

She began to wonder if she was going mad after all, staring around the empty room again for any clue that she certainly had seen an entire group of women come in here, when she noticed a latch at the edge of one of the wall panels, poorly disguised as filigree.  A servants' door!  Could the women have left through a back staircase, through an old servants' entrance?

No longer worried about decorum, Nannerl tugged at the latch and peered into the darkness beyond it.  This wasn't a passage out to the street, but a steep staircase that descended into shadow below the house.  A basement?  Why would Aloysia and her beautiful guests have moved from the parlor down to a damp, unlit basement?  Nannerl stepped back into the room long enough to grab a candlestick off the credenza.  She had already come this far.

The trembling flame from the candle was very little help once she was underground, but her ears told her all that she needed to know.  The basement was empty.  Along the walls she could make out a few broken pieces of furniture, a wine rack, and even a lopsided old wardrobe, but there was nowhere that Aloysia and her guests could have been hiding.

A floorboard creaked overhead, and Nannerl suddenly realized how absolutely ridiculous she would look if she were discovered down here.  What could she have said--"Pardon me, Frau Weber, but I forgot that my room was upstairs and went down instead?"  "Pardon me, but I was looking for your married daughter to request that she sneak into my bedchamber tonight while you sleep one floor below us?"  She gathered her skirts in her hands and hurried back up the old staircase as quickly as she dared, pushing the servants' door closed and leaving the parlor as empty as she had found it.

She could hear Sophie's little voice in the dining room still as she began mounting the staircase and breathed a sigh of relief.  If the three of them were still talking, there was no one to notice that she hadn't yet gone up to her room.  As for the mystery of Aloysia and her disappearing guests, well, it was none of her business, really.

And yet she could think of nothing else.  As Nannerl stripped down to her shift, she found herself straining for the mildest sound from below, for the rusty screech of the front door opening and closing again, but all she heard was Frau Weber bidding her daughters good night and climbing the staircase herself.  At first Nannerl sat at the edge of her bed, eyes closed, listening, but with all the Webers in the house turning in for the night, the constant creaking of floorboards could have been coming from anywhere.  She crossed to her window, cursing under her breath when she realized that her room overlooked the old church and not the street.  The rooms on the other side of the building belonged to Josepha and Sophie, who had gone to bed not long ago and, unlike their eldest sister, had never hinted that Nannerl should sneak into their bedchambers while they slept, even if she merely wanted to spy on the street through their windows.

She finally opened her door just a crack and lay on her stomach with a pillow bunched beneath her chin, waiting for Aloysia to come upstairs.  Was she still in the house at all?  But she had to be, for there was no way that she and all of her guests had left without being observed!  Perhaps there was another parlor, Nannerl told herself, and in her confusion she had simply overlooked the second door.  Perhaps they had all taken their leave from this second parlor while Nannerl was snooping foolishly around the musty old basement.  There had to be an explanation.

She had just started to doze off when she heard the loud creak of a floorboard, a stifled giggle, and the sound of someone being shushed.  Nannerl sat up so quickly that she nearly hit her head on the sloping ceiling.  It certainly didn't sound like Aloysia, but perhaps it was one of her guests.  Perhaps she was bringing one of the women upstairs after all.

Nannerl rose as gingerly as she could, slipping past her bedroom door and tiptoeing out onto the landing.  She leaned over the rail, holding her breath: if she could just confirm who was on the stairs, could just know for sure that Aloysia and her guests had been sneaking around and she wasn't imagining it, then perhaps she would be able to sleep through the night.

But then she heard another muffled giggle and froze where she stood, her conviction draining away.  There was only one person who laughed like that, and it certainly wasn't Aloysia Lange.

"Quiet, Wolfi!" Constance's voice hissed from the landing below.

"Apologies--Herr Conrad," her brother answered.  A pause, and then, "You really want to go back?"

From her vantage point, Nannerl could only see a hand on the railing below.  She recognized the cuff of one of Wolfgang's jackets and swallowed the urge to sigh.  Where had Aloysia gone?

"I just want to be with you," she heard Constance answer.  "I- I love you."

Another pause, this one a little stranger.  Eventually, she could just hear her brother mutter, "Well... thank you..." before he whispered, "Hurry!  The earlier we get there, the longer we can dance!"

Nannerl remained where she was as the hand slid down the railing, the stairs creaking under Wolfgang and Constance's feet.  The hinges on the front door let out that little screech of protest as they left, a sound Nannerl was sure she hadn't heard since Aloysia's last guest had arrived.

She pried herself away from her spot on the landing and returned to her room, shooting a dark look at Josepha and Sophie's closed doors before she turned in for the night.  At least she wasn't the only one who was actually sleeping in her own bed tonight.


	4. Le blues du businessman

Salieri was reasonably sure that Mozart hadn't figured it out yet.

Furthermore, he was very sure he didn't want him to.  

In public, Mozart was a brash, noisy little man who filled the halls of the emperor's palace with his ridiculous giggle as though he were at the local tavern.  The first time Salieri had ever seen him in person, he had brought his mistress to a rehearsal at the imperial theater and was chasing her around squealing while his weary-eyed colleagues looked on.  He had kissed her in front of all of them once he caught her, and then kissed poor Signorina Cavalieri against her will when she tried to remind him that he had a rehearsal to run.

No, it was absolutely for the best that he didn't make the connection.  There were precious few people on earth that Salieri would have trusted with his reputation, and Wolfgang Mozart was certainly not one of them.

In his saner moments, Salieri would convince himself that he was going to give it up, to go back to the life he had led before.  But then he would pass by a closed door and hear a snatch of sonata, an aria, a minuet, and he would fall again, consumed with that damned desire to possess Mozart's unknowable talent--or, failing that, the man himself.

So he did his best to avoid Mozart at the palace, a task that had become markedly easier following the closing of Figaro.  Mozart no longer prowled the halls humming to himself, intricate tunes that he conceived as he walked and released into the air, never to be heard again.  He could no longer be seen lounging in the gardens all afternoon with his sheet music spread across his knees and his quill in one hand, cuffs splattered with ink.  Free of these constant distractions, Salieri was getting more work done now than he ever had before: last week he had premiered a new opera buffa which the emperor had declared the best opera yet written, and since then he had already finished a new concerto that was to be performed in two days' time.  But it was hollow, all of it, painstaking clockwork notes that belied his struggle to find them and put them down on paper.  The more they loved his work, the more the emperor complimented him and commissioned from him, the more he hated all of it.  He began taking long, solitary walks after lunch, staring at shopkeepers and passing merchants with nauseous jealousy.  What must it be like to make so simple a living?  What must it be like to lie down at night on a straw-filled mattress, feet aching from standing all day behind a counter, and to drift off to sleep knowing that it had been a good, honest day's work?  

The morning after Signor Giuseppe Bonno died, Mozart returned to the palace with a sheaf of papers under one arm and a grimace on his face.  He nodded casually as he went by, mumbling, "Herr Salieri.  Herr Rosenberg." 

"Signor Mozart," Salieri answered, unable to contain a small sigh of relief.  There had been no glimmer of recognition when their eyes met, not a trace of his smile anywhere on his face.  He had no idea.  The danger passed.

If only he had been alone then!  It would have been a meaningless moment among many, and Mozart would have continued on his way.  But nothing ever went to plan when Rosenberg was at his side.  The little count refused to return the simple greeting, leaning toward Salieri instead and theatrically whispering, "Well, I do hope the featherbrain doesn't think he's going to apply for Herr Bonno's open position!  Can you imagine it, Salieri?  His Majesty naming a Kapellmeister whose last opera closed in disgrace?"

Mozart stopped, his shoulders tense, and Salieri let out an entirely different kind of sigh as he whirled around to face them.  "Herr Rosenberg," Mozart snarled, eyes flashing, "Would you like to make a comment about the quality of my music?"

Salieri glanced toward the nearest door, but he held his position as Mozart closed in on them.  He should have been free to go since the insult hadn't come from him; on the other hand, he did have a history of letting Rosenberg speak for the both of them.  Maybe if he remained still enough, he wouldn't draw Mozart's attention.

"Why, I think you would find my own comments wholly irrelevant, wouldn't you, you rogue?" Rosenberg was saying.  He was peering down the length of his nose at Mozart; given that he was considerably shorter, this meant that his head was tilted almost all the way back.  "Why, if I'm not mistaken, your work can't even be heard anywhere at the moment, can it, hm?  Can it?  Remind me, my dear Salieri, how long has it been since the emperor commissioned anything from Herr Mozart, would you say?"

Salieri hesitated.  Both Mozart and Rosenberg were staring at him now, one fuming and the other with that greasy smirk.  Well, he was in it now.  Clearing his throat, he placed a hand on Rosenberg's shoulder and murmured, "We can't forget that he and Signor Da Ponte have been working together on a new opera, my friend."

It should have been a mild enough comment to quiet Rosenberg down and end the conversation, but Mozart did not walk away.  Even after Rosenberg had harrumphed and stormed off, Mozart remained where he was, staring at Salieri's hand.  A furrow appeared between his brows.  His gaze slid to Salieri's face, then down to his breeches, then up to his eyes.  Then, to Salieri's horror, an incredulous grin spread across his lips.

Merda.

"If you'll excuse me," Salieri mumbled, inclining his head and hurrying toward the nearest empty salon.  Perhaps it was his imagination, perhaps Mozart was only smiling at him because Salieri had very nearly defended him in front of Rosenberg.  Perhaps he was only looking at him that way because his opinion of him was changed.

But just when he reached the door, Mozart replied, "In any case, I do look forward to seeing you again later... maestro."  

There was laughter in his voice.

When the coast was clear Salieri went directly home, locked the door to his bedchamber, and then kicked a chair at it.  

It was all Da Ponte's fault, like most of the messes in which Salieri had found himself over the years.  There had been a rumor curling temptingly through the court that a new club had sprung up, meeting nightly in the old ballroom of some ruined baron's estate, and that only gentlemen of certain proclivities were welcome there.  It was the sort of idea that was sneered at or giggled about in polite society, a revolting, blasphemous notion.  But despite what his well-tailored clothes, his work ethic, and his wide-eyed stare led his colleagues at the court to believe, Lorenzo Da Ponte had never been polite society.

How he had found the address or gotten the password, Salieri didn't know.  He also didn't know whether Da Ponte thought of himself as a prospective member of the club or a mere spectator.  Above all, he had no idea what possessed him to agree to accompany his librettist to the masked ball that first night.

Oh, he had pretended to be bored alright.  He had stood in a corner with his arms crossed, knowing his mask was glowering at the room while behind it, Salieri was free to watch the dancing, the drinking, the gambling, and listen to the laughter of these men who, for probably the first time in their lives, were able to hold their lovers against them at a ball.  Even without being able to see their expressions, Salieri had read their posture, their energy, their pride.  By the time Da Ponte tugged at his arm and muttered that he would be too tired to write in the morning if they didn't leave soon, Salieri was hooked.  The next night, he came back alone.

And for a long time, it had been enough to simply stand there for hours on end, to bask in it all.  There was no harm in attending a party, helping himself to a few pastries and watching others dance, was there?  And with this unlikely oasis waiting for him each night, the days were more bearable too.  At one point he even laughed at one of Da Ponte's filthy jokes in the presence of the emperor himself.

But it had all changed with a sonatina.

The music at the club was generally subpar, but hard to judge too harshly since it was provided by drunken members daring each other to pick up the violin or have a seat at the poorly-tuned clavichord in the corner.  There was something charming about its flaws, its missed notes, its faltering melodies.  It erased any notion of formality that the grand old ballroom might have given their nightly gatherings.

But one night, the music was perfect.

Salieri was leaning in his usual corner, exchanging nods with masks he had begun to recognize, shaking his head politely when newcomers tried to tempt him out on the floor. On the far side of the room, a baritone had been standing on the clavichord bench butchering what Salieri supposed was meant to be a Gluck aria.  He finished, bowed, and hopped down, leaving the dancers to continue to move in silence in the interim.  It never took long for someone else to step up, and tonight was no exception.  A great shout rose up from the cards tables as a man in an overworked lavender jacket broke away from the crowd and settled himself on the bench.  When he began to play, Salieri's knees nearly gave out.  He knew that music, that style.  He would have recognized it anywhere.  Wolfgang Mozart had come to his club.

That first night, Salieri had stormed out at once, hurrying home where sleep had eluded him for a long, torturous night.  Had Mozart just come to satisfy casual curiosity as Da Ponte had apparently done?  Had he been invited by a friend and been unable to resist the chance to show off when it had arisen?  Or had he come on purpose?  Could he have meant to be there?

Salieri had stayed home for a week after that, his heart pounding in his ears every time he considered going back.

But he couldn't stay away, not when the ballroom was constantly lingering in his thoughts.  Even Mozart's music couldn't drown out the rhythm of the dancers' feet, the harmony of their contented sighs.

So he had gone back, stationing himself a little nearer to the clavichord this time. Sometime after midnight the lavender jacket had appeared again: Mozart had seized an opportunity to slip onto the bench.  He played for nearly an hour, mostly improvising.  The tunes that were pouring out of him were a perfect summary of the club, of the dancers, of love that found a way to thrive despite the law.  By the end of the night, he had drifted across the floor and was standing by Mozart's shoulder, watching his fingers expertly work the keys.  He had never dared to stand this close in the palace.  He had been afraid that it would be like staring directly at the sun.

When he finished playing, Mozart had turned to Salieri, his brown eyes glimmering behind his mask, and had winked at him before getting up and dissolving into the crowd.

Salieri had stayed home for two nights after that, terrified that he had somehow been recognized.

The third day, Da Ponte invited him to dinner at his apartment.  When Salieri arrived, Mozart was there, finishing up some work on Figaro.  Salieri had lingered at the edge of the room, watching the two of them work together--or rather, watching Da Ponte desperately try to corral Mozart into getting something written down.  His presence had no effect on the composer, not even a knowing look shot in his direction.  And yet, watching him create more of his music, knowing that he was witnessing the birth of something immortal, well, it had had the same impact on Salieri as the first time he had seen a couple at the club lift their masks to exchange a kiss.

He went back to the club that night.

Mozart was there again, already at the clavichord, still wearing the same clothes he had had on at Da Ponte's apartment.  When Salieri appeared at his side he paused in his music, grinned, and said, "Good, there you are!  I was afraid you weren't coming back."  He had scooted over slightly on the bench then, patting the space beside him until Salieri nervously took it.  "Do you play?"

"Some," Salieri muttered, wondering if Mozart's skilled ear would be able to recognize his voice.  They traveled in the same circles at court for the most part, but ever since the first time he had heard the aria from die Entführung aus dem Serail Salieri had done his best to keep distance between them. 

Crowded onto the bench together, knees brushing beneath the clavichord, there was no more distance now.  Mozart inclined his head toward the keys and said, "Play with me then... maestro."

Maestro!  Salieri had nearly jumped to his feet at the title.  But when Mozart began an old sonatina by Bach, he hadn't been able to resist joining in with the melody.  Someone behind them whistled suggestively; beneath his mask, Salieri flushed.

"You're good!" Mozart had said in surprise, and Salieri had been so relieved at not being recognized that his fingers had stumbled, earning a good-natured chuckle from Mozart.  He lifted his right hand and covered Salieri's left with it, leaning even closer.  Of course, he somehow managed to continue his part of the sonatina with his left hand, machine that he was.  Salieri, meanwhile, found that he was powerless to carry on with the melody.  "You have elegant hands," Mozart had murmured, curling his fingers around Salieri's palm and then tracing them down the inside of his wrist.  "Long fingers," he went on.  "Very... skilled, I'd wager.  Would you care to take me up on it?"

Salieri swallowed, watching Mozart's fingers draw a line along his vein and toy idly with his cuff.  Why did it seem like his fingertips were burning into his flesh?  "I- I don't want you to see my face," he blurted, wincing even as he said it.

But Mozart simply cocked his head at him, eyes flashing from behind his own mask.  "I didn't ask to."

There were three stories of empty rooms to choose from in the old house, though many of the doors were already closed and none of them had another clavichord.  Toward the end of the hall stood an empty dressing room with no windows, furnished only with a desk and a wobbly old settee.  This was where Mozart and Salieri ended up, closing the door and extinguishing the candles.  This was where they always ended up after that, a blind symphony of sighs, of grunts, and, on Mozart's end, of giggles.  Somehow, the darkness had been enough to absolve Salieri of every sin, of the endless lies he spun for Mozart and for everyone else, of the adultery against Mozart's wife, of the sodomy.  

But the darkness had not extended far enough, and Mozart had figured it out.

That night, he threw his mask into the fire.


	5. Quand on arrive en ville

It was surprisingly hard to get Aloysia Lange alone.

Frau Weber was taking her duties as a host extremely seriously, filling Nannerl's schedule with lunches and outings while the sun was up, then filling her plate with dinner and the air with chatter every evening.  While her second and third days in Vienna plodded by like the first, Nannerl began to wonder if she had made a mistake in leaving Salzburg.  At least back home she had had a house full of kind servants and correspondence from her fathers' sympathetic friends.  She could have found her way there, following the path left behind by her father and composing her own life one note at a time.  In Salzburg, she had already known the difference between people whose names opened doors and those who were only pretending to wield influence.  By the end of that third afternoon, she had the distinct impression that the people at the salons the Webers frequented fell into the latter category.  For a family of trained singers, they certainly spent a lot of time with merchants and gamblers.

Well, what if she didn't need connections at all?  Maybe it would be easier to just give in and accept a husband, as her father had always begged her to do.  Marriage certainly hadn't damaged Aloysia's singing career, after all.

Which begged the thought: what else didn't Aloysia's marriage prevent her from doing?

The women came again on the second night, filing one by one into the parlor and then falling silent for the rest of the evening behind a closed door.  Nannerl distracted herself by watching Constance, who seemed to be on the verge of tears every time she thought no one was looking at her.  When Wolfgang finally sprang to his feet, announced he was going to bed, and asked his wife if she wanted to join him, Nannerl couldn't resist scowling at him while Constance beamed.  Whatever was going on with those two, she was going to have to have a talk with her brother about it.  When she had met Constance after their wedding, she had been a bubbly, beaming woman crowned by a halo of golden curls.  Now, she drifted aimlessly through her days like a fading echo of that person.  It wasn't like Wolfgang to drain the life out of someone who loved him.  Was it?

On second thought, maybe accepting a husband wouldn't be the easier path.

When Aloysia's companions arrived on the third night, the last one didn't latch the parlor door behind her. It drifted open just a crack, revealing a narrow glimmer of light.  A hint.  Nannerl didn't take her eyes off it.  For the first time, she stayed up later than all of the Webers, smiling at their jokes and feigning interest in their gossip, staring across the hall at the door of the parlor all the while.  Josepha was the last to turn in, reminding Nannerl to extinguish the fire when she finished her wine and mounting the creaky staircase to her room on the highest floor.

The house fell silent after that, and Nannerl waited.  The women had all gone in through that door, so they would have to come back out at some point.

From outside, she heard the steady clop of a horse passing in the street and the murmur of pedestrian voices, then the welcome rush of rainfall.  The starlight distorted as it passed through the rain-dappled windows, casting cloudy shadows along the floor.

An hour must have passed in this manner.  The shower passed.  Nannerl poured water into her wine glass to try to clear her head and was returning to her seat when she heard a noise.  From within the parlor came the unmistakable sound of a sigh and the click of a latch.  A single set of footsteps.

Nannerl put down her glass, lifting her skirts in her hands and walking gingerly on her toes.  She crossed the foyer and edged toward the waiting parlor door.  Was one of the guests leaving early, or was it Aloysia herself turning in for the night?  Did Nannerl dare storm into the room and demand to know what was going on?

She didn't have to.  Without warning a long arm shot through the partially-open door, seizing her by the wrist and pulling her right into the parlor.  Nannerl swallowed a shriek of surprise, but she couldn't suppress a gasp when she was shoved against the wall, her captor's hands planted on either shoulder.

It was Aloysia, the ice in her expression fading to a grin when she realized who it was she had ensnared.

"It's a little late to be sneaking around the halls, Fraulein Mozart," she breathed, her voice tinged with that poisonous sarcasm.  "What's the matter?  Did you have trouble sleeping?"

Nannerl opened her mouth to answer, but quickly closed it when she saw the glint in Aloysia's eye.  This was a test.  All she had to do was agree, and Aloysia would let her go upstairs.  If she was merely getting some air before she went to bed, if she hadn't been snooping around the parlor looking for Aloysia and her guests, she would be free to go.  She let her gaze slide from Aloysia's dark stare down the length of her neck to her sharp collar bones, and then back up to her mouth.  She had never been so close, never actually touched her until now.  Nannerl licked her lips, meeting her captor's eye as she said, "My bed was too cold.  I was looking for something to warm it up."

Aloysia released her at that, which Nannerl found a little disappointing.  At least one corner of her shapely mouth was turned up in that smirk she so often wore at the dinner table.  Aloysia crooked her index finger beneath Nannerl's chin, tilting her head back and appraising her.  And what did she see?  Was she surprised at Nannerl's audacity?  Were all those shared glances, those flicks of the tongue, those suggestive comments just a game for the bored wife of a traveling artist?  Had Nannerl been a mere distraction for her? Or was there real intent behind their tense flirtation?  When the pad of Aloysia's thumb grazed ever so slightly across her mouth, Nannerl couldn't resist catching it between her lips.

Aloysia's eyes widened almost imperceptibly; Nannerl wouldn't have even noticed it if their faces weren't so close.  She withdrew her thumb, but uncurled the finger under Nannerl's chin and drew a slow line down the side of her throat.  Nannerl felt the hairs on her arm standing up and forced herself to concentrate on keeping her shoulders planted against the wall, fighting the urge to close the distance between them.  The fingertip grazed along her neck, pausing at her shoulder and then following the neckline of her dress before she finally dropped her arm and stepped back.

Nannerl swallowed, tracking Aloysia with her eyes as she paced to the other side of the room, opened the hidden door to the basement, and disappeared from view.

So what had happened?  Another suggestive comment, the brush of her lips against Aloysia's finger, a lingering touch, and... that was it?  She was walking away?  Meanwhile Nannerl had been so overwhelmed by the encounter that she was lightheaded, aching to be touched again.  She took an unsteady step away from the wall, gripping the arm of one of the elegant chairs for support.

Aloysia reappeared in the basement doorway, her hands on her hips.  "Well?" she whispered. "Are you coming or not?"

"Coming?" Nannerl repeated, though she had already let go of the chair.  "Where?"

But Aloysia just smiled and stepped out of view.

The old staircase was as steep as Nannerl remembered, narrow enough that her skirts clung to the cold stone walls on either side as she descended.  In the basement, the darkness was absolute.  Nannerl strained her eyes, extending one foot to confirm that there were no more stairs, spreading her hands out in front of her lest she bump into something.  From somewhere beyond her reach, Aloysia tittered.  Fingers laced through hers and pulled her forward, their footsteps muffled against the dirt floor.  "Aloysia?" she hissed, trying to figure out where she was with her other hand.

Another laugh, then the rush of warm breath and the lightest graze of soft lips against hers.  Nannerl leaned forward, but Aloysia had already released her hand and moved away.

"Aloysia!" she said again, a little louder this time.  She swept her arms through the musty air all around her but found nothing.  The tease!  She bit back a smile and dropped her arms, licking her lips.  Aloysia had kissed her!  At least she hadn't been wrong about that.  "You're very cruel," she grumbled, pretending to pout.  "I'm going back upstairs."

The hiss of a match, and the far corner of the basement was suddenly bathed in a faint orange glow.  She could just make out Aloysia's smile, then the glint of her eyes as she lit a taper. 

"What are we doing down here?" Nannerl asked.  "Where are your guests?"

Without answering, Aloysia went over to the old wardrobe that loomed in one corner and opened the doors, lifting the candle high so Nannerl could see.  The back of the wardrobe was missing.  Behind it, a section of the basement wall had crumbled, and enough of the stones had been removed to make an opening through which a person could easily fit.  And on the other side of the broken wall was a wide, dark passage.

"What in god's name-" Nannerl breathed, but Aloysia had already stepped through the wardrobe and into the tunnel, taking the candle with her.  "Aloysia! Aloysia, wait!"

Following the fading glow of the single candle, Nannerl clambered through the broken wardrobe, struggling in the half-darkness to find footing amid the crumbling stones that had once been part of the wall.  She regained her composure when she was inside the tunnel, noting with satisfaction that she, unlike Aloysia, was small enough to hurry down the dank passageway without stooping.

At first, she had assumed that Aloysia and her friends had dug the tunnel themselves, or had had it dug for their own purposes, but as she made her way through the passage it became clear that its existence must have predated the God's Eye itself.  Cobwebs and winding tree roots filled disused corners and blocked off smaller tunnels that occasionally opened on either side.  It wasn't until she passed the first chamber filled with rotting wooden coffins that Nannerl realized that these weren't access tunnels at all, but the remnants of the catacombs that had run beneath the church next door.  She had the strange impression of stepping into a bygone time of stained glass and stone, only the many footprints left by the fine shoes of Aloysia and her band of visitors reminding her of what she was doing.

Aloysia was waiting for her when they reached the final room.  The floor of the chapel had partially collapsed into this space, bringing with it murky light from above, a pair of pews, and shattered pieces of tile that were spread across the floor of the crypt like constellations.  Aloysia stood with her back to the pile of rubble, outlined in the starlight that shone through the old windows of the church above.  She smiled when she saw Nannerl and blew out her candle.  "Well?"

"What could have possibly possessed you to go crawling around the catacombs under the ruins of a church?" Nannerl blurted.  "There were human remains in those chambers!"

"In Vienna," Aloysia said quietly, taking Nannerl's hand in hers, "there are men who dance and drink all night in the name of Sodom, hidden away in their underground ballroom.  But we aren't so frivolous.  We are Gomorrah, and we meet in a crypt."  She brought Nannerl's knuckles to her lips.

"We?"

"Up here," she said.  Still leading Nannerl by the hand, Aloysia mounted an old stone staircase and stood with her behind the dusty altar, gesturing widely.

There was a savage beauty in the old chapel.  Its stone walls and the high arches of its ceiling still stood, but the colorful panes of glass in the windows were cracked, faded, or altogether missing.  Though the middle of the floor had sagged down into the crypt below, many of the other pews remained where they had stood decades ago when they had supported countless parishioners and penitents.  Tattered rags hung from the walls in a few places, the only remnants of tapestries that must have depicted saints, angels, and disciples.

And here were the missing guests who disappeared into the parlor of the God's Eye each night!  A pair of them were stretched out across a pew, one with her head in the other's lap, the other winding her fingers through her hair; the rest of them were clustered around a half-rotten table playing cards.  They lifted their heads and shot knowing glances at Aloysia and Nannerl, but none of them got up or called them over.  Nannerl had never seen women go so far to make themselves comfortable in a public space: their cloaks were draped over a pew at the front of the room, and a few had even gone so far as to unlace their dresses or step out of their hoops.

Through a missing pane of stained glass patched by a cobweb, Nannerl could see half of the harvest moon in the sky beyond the old church.  It could have been a hideous, shambles of a building, and yet the sight of it shook something deep within her.  She turned to face Aloysia, who had been studying her as she got her bearings, their fingers still intertwined.  "It's beautiful," Nannerl murmured, her voice strangely thick.

For perhaps the first time since she had met her, there was a moment where Aloysia's smile was genuine and bright.  She recovered quickly, dropping Nannerl's hand only to seize her by the waist and lift her onto the old altar.  Nannerl shrieked in surprise, then cried out when one of her shoes fell off.  Aloysia tutted, wrapping a hand around her ankle, then sliding it up the length of her calf, deftly untying the ribbon that held her stocking in place and rolling it down her leg.  She draped the stocking and the ribbon around the back of Nannerl's neck like a scarf, using them to pull her in for another of those light, teasing kisses.  "Welcome to Gomorrah," she breathed, releasing the stocking and slipping her hand back beneath Nannerl's skirts.

Nannerl leaned into her touch, gripping the edges of the altar and catching her lower lip between her teeth.

On second thought, she was very glad she had decided to leave Salzburg.


	6. La complainte de la serveuse automate

Aloysia snatched the plate out of Constance's hand and dropped it back into the washpan.

"No!" Constance blurted, jumping back to avoid the splash of dirty water, "that was almost clean! Aloysia, what are you doing?"

"Almost clean? You've been wiping that same plate for three minutes. Now at least you'll have something to wipe off of it," her sister said with a self-satisfied smirk.

Had she really?  Constance fished the plate back out, dried it as quickly as she could, and returned it to the cupboard. It always made her tense when Aloysia hovered.

"So? What's bothering you, little sister?  What has you rubbing the patterns off the china this time?"

"Nothing," Constance muttered, wringing out the cloth and untying her apron.  She turned to go back upstairs, but Aloysia had planted herself in the doorway, hands on her hips.  Constance rolled her eyes.  "May I pass, your Highness?"

"If you pay the fare."

"Which is?"

"The truth."  Aloysia crossed her arms and leaned casually against the door frame.  "Tell me what's really bothering you.  Is it the rumors about Wolfgang's new opera?"

"As if I've ever put any stock in rumors!" huffed Constance.  "There have always been small minds that conspire against my husband's music, and his work proves them wrong every time!"

"So what is it, then?" Aloysia pressed.  When Constance rolled her eyes again, she said, "I've lost my position at the Burgtheater, you know, and my husband is off in Corsica.  There's nothing preventing me from standing in this doorway all day."

Constance threw the balled-up apron at her.  "You'll tease me."

"Maybe," Aloysia said, tossing it back over her shoulder and onto a chair.  "Maybe not.  Is it Wolfgang?"

"Well... do you remember-" Constance dropped her voice- "do you remember what you said about an English mollyhouse springing up in Vienna?"

"The underground ball," said Aloysia.

"Right."

Her sister shrugged.  "What of it?"

"I- I've been there," Constance admitted.  "I've been there a lot.  With Wolfgang."

"Oh!"

"I wear breeches and one of his old coats," she went on, watching her sister with a reluctant interest.  She wasn't sure if she had ever seen her look quite so taken aback before.  Aloysia had always been one of those rare people who seemed to be in control of any room she entered.  

Now her brow was furrowed, one finger tapping against her chin as she visibly worked to internalize and categorize this new information about her brother-in-law.  At length, she looked back up and Constance and asked, "Why does he bring you along?"

"I'm not sure," she said quietly.  Here was the root of the terror that had been curling through her thoughts these past few days.  While she and Wolfgang were getting dressed and sneaking through the moonlit streets of Vienna those nightly trips to the ballroom were a thrill, a secret that bound them together.  But as soon as they were through the doors, Wolfgang would leave her side and the spell would break.  Until recently, he had wound his way across the dance floor until he came upon that same man in black and the two of them would slip off together in front of everyone.  In front of Constance!  But for the past few nights the man in black had not come.  Some nights Wolfgang would grab a glass of wine and push another guest away from the clavichord in the corner, composing frantic melodies until he was too drunk to go on, and he would have to be borne away on the shoulders of rowdy revelers.  Dear Herr Stephanie was usually on hand to conduct the Mozarts to his carriage whenever the night ended that way.  Other times, Wolfgang would simply migrate to the far corner of the floor and stand with his arms crossed, observing the revelers in moody silence.  No matter what he did with his nights, he never rejoined Constance until he was ready to leave.  Left to her own devices, she tended to slip over to an old bench where she would perch anxiously for hours, careful to drop her shoulders and spread her knees like a man lest she arouse suspicion.  Whenever anyone approached her, she would shake her head and mutter in her lowest voice that she was waiting for someone.  Sometimes Herr Stephanie would sit with her and talk for a while, shooting anxious glances in Wolfgang's direction as he brought up mundane topics like the weather and who the emperor was favoring for the open Kapellmeister position.  Sometimes a stranger would invite her to dance and she would consider taking him up on it just to spite her husband.  But she couldn't bear the thought of deceiving any of the proper guests, or of being discovered and thrown out.  What choice did she have?  If she stayed home knowing Wolfgang was alone at the ballroom, would she be able to sleep in her empty bed?  Yet if she forbade him to go, what chance did she have of earning back his love?

"Little sister," Aloysia said suddenly, clapping her hands onto Constance's shoulders and breaking into her thoughts, "just how long has it been since you went out during the day?"

"During the day?" Constance repeated.  "What do you mean?"

"Let's go up to the palace!  Bring that foolish husband of yours along, too.  Sunlight and a little exposure to the real world will do you both good."

Constance broke away from her, re-folding the apron and storing it neatly on its shelf.  "Maybe," she said, echoing Aloysia's words from earlier, "and maybe not."

Aloysia was right about one thing: it had been a long time since Constance had stepped out of Wolfgang's underground world and stood in the sunlight.  She laid her forehead against the cool glass of the coach window and watched the streets clatter past.  What if the two of them left Vienna altogether?  Far from the cold stares they received in emperor's court and the stifled laughter in the salons, maybe Wolfgang would blossom into his old self again.  But what would he be without his fame, without even the most poisonous of audiences?  She could hardly imagine Wolfgang standing at her side in a tomato garden, leaning on a pitchfork with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his knees stained with dirt.  He would never be able to make a life beyond the shadow of his talent.  He wouldn't know how to leave it behind. He wouldn't want to.

At her side, Wolfgang was leaning forward in his seat, staring out his own window. His fingers tapped anxiously across his knees, no doubt composing or rehearsing over imaginary keys.  Aloysia sat across from them, leaned back and watching them.  If Wolfgang was always composing, Aloysia's mind put just as much energy into scheming.  Constance caught her eye and stuck her tongue out at her, earning one of her sister's rare smiles.

She waited until the carriage rolled to a stop outside the Paris and footmen had helped the women out onto the cobbles before she asked, "Well?  Why did you really want us to come to court with you today?"

"Darling little Stanzi!" Aloysia gasped, recoiling and spreading a hand over her heart in mock offense.  "So mistrustful!  I only wanted to see you both get some fresh air!"

"And?"

"And," said Aloysia, "if we happen to encounter La Cavalieri at her voice lesson, maybe Wolfgang can convince her to put in a word for me with the managers at the Burgtheater."  She laced her arm through Constance's and patted the back of her hand.

Constance grinned.  Of course this was about Aloysia's position at the theater.  She should have seen it right away!  Caterina Cavalieri had sung in most of Wolfgang's operas before Figaro; she was one of the few people at court who still seemed sympathetic to him.  Despite this, she was well-liked by the everyone who hated the name Mozart.  More importantly to Aloysia, La Cavalieri was also well-liked by the same managers who had refused to augment Aloysia's salary any more until she had made a big show of quitting with the expectation that it would change their minds.  It hadn't.  Using La Cavalieri to repair Aloysia's image at the Burgtheater was a pretty good plan, and using Wolfgang to convince her to help made sense as well.  At least it was one of her sister's rare schemes where no one was likely to be hurt--no one except the managers' purses, that is.

Wolfgang joined them as the coach rolled away.  To Constance's surprise, she saw that familiar old light in his eyes that hadn't been there since the first night he had sneaked her into the underground ball.  "Can we stop by the music rooms to see if any of my friends are here?" he asked, already skipping ahead of them.  "After that we can take a turn in the gardens, if you want."

Aloysia caught Constance's eye and winked.  "Oh, Wolfgang, what an excellent idea!"

They could hear La Cavalieri's powerful voice long before Aloysia rapped on the closed door of the salon.  She stepped into the room first, saying, "Please, Fraulein Cavalieri, don't mind us!  Do go on!"

Constance and Wolfgang slipped in behind her.  The little diva was standing alongside a harpsichord, watching her new audience file into the room with a look of suspicion until she spotted Wolfgang and relaxed.  "Maestro?" she said to the man sitting at the keys.  "From the top of the aria?"

The music began again, and after a moment La Cavalieri joined in.  Constance couldn't help but smile as she took a seat in a chair next to Aloysia's.  She loved her eldest sister and was proud of her career, but her voice was nowhere near as powerful and pure as that of La Cavalieri.  The problem was that Aloysia knew it.  The two divas had never been very close, usually starring in operas that were mounted at different theaters at the same time.  Aloysia must have been getting desperate to get her career back if she was willing to turn to her old rival for help.

Constance folded her hands in her lap, watching the lesson and wondering how such an enormous voice could come from such a little woman, when a movement caught her eye.  Wolfgang hadn't taken a seat like the sisters: instead, he was approaching the composer from behind, that same bright grin on his face.

Constance furrowed her brow, looking from her husband to the man seated at the harpsichord.  She knew him, of course: he was Antonio Salieri, one of Count Rosenberg's friends and the person Herr Stephanie kept saying the emperor was likely to name Kapellmeister now that Herr Bono had died.  A few months ago Aloysia had learned that he was also one of the people responsible for the failure of Figaro, though Wolfgang kept trying to deny it.  Her husband counted him as one of his friends at the court for some reason.  Constance had serious doubts that Herr Salieri felt the same way.

When Wolfgang dropped a hand onto Herr Salieri's shoulder and murmured something into his ear, the composer sprang to his feet so suddenly that he upset the bench he had been sitting on.  It toppled over, cracking against Wolfgang's shins.  Her husband leaped back, doubled over in pain; without even glancing in his direction, Herr Salieri stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

"Oh, for heavens' sake!" La Cavalieri snapped, throwing her sheet music at Wolfgang.  It fluttered ineffectually to the ground around them, swirling across the floor in the breeze from the open window.

Aloysia seized Constance's arm.  "Stanzi," she muttered, "would you please-?"

"Oh, Wolfgang!" cried Constance, hurrying across the room to comfort her dumbfounded husband.  "You poor thing!  Are your legs alright?"  She picked up the bench and guided Wolfgang onto it, shooting a glance at Aloysia.  If La Cavalieri was angry with Wolfgang, did that mean she had lost her leverage?

But she never should have underestimated Aloysia.  "Goodness!" her sister said, rising and collecting the pages of music from the floor. "I knew Herr Salieri was jealous of your talent, Wolfgang, but I didn't realize just how dramatically it must eat at him!"

"He couldn't even bear to be in the same room as you, poor Wolfi," said Constance, catching on.

"And Fraulein Cavalieri," Aloysia went on, straightening the music and holding it out to her, "I had no idea our visit would disrupt your lesson!  How can Wolfgang make it up to you?  Maybe... he could accompany you in Maestro Salieri's stead?  After all-"

La Cavalieri snatched the music out of Aloysia's hands.  "He could make it up to me by finding Maestro Salieri and bringing him back to finish the lesson!  The maestro is working on his best opera yet, one that will convince the emperor to name him Kapellmeister, and he has already offered me the leading role!  And if after all the lessons I've already had with Maestro Mozart-"

"Well, Wolfgang applied for the open position too!" Constance interrupted.  "Didn't you, Wolfgang?"

"I-? Yeah," Wolfgang muttered, still staring at the door through which his colleague had disappeared.  "It was my sister's idea."

La Cavalieri narrowed her eyes.  "Your sister?" she repeated  "She's a composer too, isn't she?"

"She used to be," Wolfgang shrugged.

"Would- Fraulein, would you like a lesson with Fraulein Mozart?" Aloysia suggested.  She had that sly look on her face again, the one that meant that she had just found another track.  "I can arrange it.  I can arrange a dozen, if you'd like!  She has such a unique style, lovely Nannerl, something I'm sure you've never experienced with any of the court composers."

Constance glanced from Aloysia's face to La Cavalieri's, her hands still on Wolfgang's shoulders.  What was Aloysia talking about?  What did she know about Nannerl's music?

But La Cavalieri's interest was obvious.  "She does lessons?"

"Of course!  Doesn't she, Wolfgang?"

"Uh, she did when we were younger, before Father forbade it."

"And now your father is dead," Aloysia said sharply--a little too sharply.

Wolfgang pushed Constance's hands off his shoulders.  "Let's go home," he muttered.

Aloysia moved quickly; she turned on her heel and threw an arm around Wolfgang's shoulders.  "Right you are, Wolfgang.  I can see that we're not wanted here," she said loudly.  "Come along, Constance."

"Alright," she sighed, pushing the bench under the harpsichord and hurrying after her family.

Aloysia's fingers had just brushed the door when La Cavalieri called, "Wait!"

Her sister froze, then released Wolfgang and turned slowly to face the little diva.

"The maestro's sister," La Cavalieri said, "what will it take for her to meet with me?  Does she require payment?"

"You know, Nannerl is a dear friend of mine," Aloysia said slowly.  "She was just telling me the other day how much she wished she could hear me sing at the Opera again.  And I would love to, if only to please her!  But then there's the question of my salary..."

La Cavalieri scoffed.  "I should have known!"

"If you don't think the managers would listen to you..." Aloysia began, turning back toward the door.

"I'll speak to them," La Cavalieri said, the words coming out a little too quickly.  "I'll do it!  But I want to meet with Signorina Mozart before the end of the week."

Aloysia faced her rival, that familiar smirk spreading across her face.  "How does tomorrow afternoon sound?"

Constance sighed, but she couldn't suppress a smile.  Aloysia had always known how to get what she wanted. 


	7. Coup de foudre

The trade-off was simple: a good deal less sleep at night for a great many more friends and connections in Vienna.

Nannerl found herself looking forward to the arrival of the first guest each night, even to the point of being distracted during the day.  By the time the family assembled for dinner, Nannerl was breathless, barely able to eat as she waited for that knock on the front door of the Gods Eye.  Waiting for that moment that Aloysia would turn to her with her knowing grin and ask, "Will you be joining us this evening, Fraulein?"

As if she could stand to go up to her room and sleep when freedom was so close!

Past the silent parlor, across the musty basement, through the winding catacombs, the ruined church was always waiting.

Of course, she had spotted the old organ the moment Aloysia had first lifted her up on the altar and kissed her.  It was nestled into an alcove behind the cards table, a collection of tarnished pipes crowning a cracked keyboard.  It had lingered in her thoughts as Aloysia led her around and introduced her to her comrades, the notion of sitting before it even driving her to forget the others' names at first.  She hadn't been allowed to play an organ since she was a girl, since her last recital before her father had told her that it was time to focus on Wolfgang's career, and time for Nannerl to help her mother manage the household.

Though she hadn't remembered everyone's names that first night, she did notice that most of the members of Aloysia's circle came from musical backgrounds.  The core of the group were dancers and singers Aloysia must have collected during her career at the Opera.  Then there were their partners: there was Tatiana, a brown-eyed ballerina who always arrived with her Algerian lady's maid, the air of formality between them only dissolving when they were in the safety of the church; golden-haired Benedikta Faust was another wiry dancer who spent her evenings with her arms around a stocky seamstress named Charlotte.  There were perhaps a dozen women all told.  They were a friendly, relaxed group who were content to chat the night away over their cards games, none of them even lifting an eyebrow if two or three members of the group broke away and closed themselves off in the maintenance cupboard behind the organ, or slipped down the stone stairs and disappeared into the dark crypt beneath their feet.

The strange thing was that after only a few nights, Nannerl knew more about the other members of the underground order than she knew about Aloysia herself.

It wasn't for lack of trying, of course.  But Aloysia seemed to be more interested in playing Nannerl's body like the old organ in the corner, observing with that look of detached interest in her large eyes as Nannerl twitched and gasped under her touch, then pulling away whenever Nannerl reached for her.  It certainly wasn't what Nannerl had expected.  Maybe she was too romantic.  Had she been foolish to think that somewhere behind the armor of sarcasm in which Aloysia had encased herself, there was a human heart that over which Nannerl had some influence?

At least the other women wanted to get to know her.  The first time she had sat at the old organ and picked out the tune of one of the hymns she used to know, the ladies had abandoned their cards game and crowded around her.  By the time she reached the second verse, some of them were even singing along.  For a few minutes she was a child again, her legs too short to reach the pedalboard, her father groaning each time she hit a sour note.  It had been so long!  She didn't want to spell to break.  After playing through every hymn she could remember, her fingers found their way through one of her original compositions, a song her father had told her was too derivative to be performed in public.  The ladies had cooed over it; lovely Tatiana had even made up lyrics and sung along.

Music became a regular part of their evenings after that.  Aloysia had her way with her first, leading her into a shadowy corner of the crypt or pushing her onto one of the hard pews at the back of the chapel.  Her kisses were always light and brief, just a brush of skin and a flutter of breath before she leaned away, out of reach again.  Nannerl would be left biting her lips and thrusting against Aloysia's fingers, imagining what it would be like to wind her arms around her, to kiss her deeply and properly, to run her fingers over Aloysia's exposed skin and elicit a gasp from her, to catch her off-guard.  But then Aloysia would inevitably crook a finger and be the one to catch Nannerl off-guard.  She would watch her with that knowing smirk until she was done, wipe her fingers along the inside of Nannerl's thigh, and, if she was feeling particularly warm, catch her hand and press a kiss to her knuckles.  Sometimes Aloysia would linger after that, presiding over the group like an empress among her courtiers; more often than not, she would wait until Nannerl had installed herself in front of the organ and slip away while the ladies sang.

Outside of the chapel and the crypt, nothing had changed.  Frau Weber's favorite salons were filled with the same leering social climbers and her daughters' gossip with the same unfamiliar names.  At least her hosts were kind enough to avoid voicing the question that she sometimes saw in their eyes when they regarded her: what did she hope to make of herself now that her father was gone?  What did she hope to find here in Vienna?  Maybe her new acquaintances would help show her the way.

But it was Aloysia herself who presented Nannerl with her first opportunity in Vienna: Caterina Cavalieri, a well-known soprano who was presently engaged at the Burgtheater, had specifically requested a lesson from Nannerl Mozart.

It had been so long since Nannerl had given a lesson!  She arrived at the palace an hour earlier than the prearranged time, sitting impatiently in the corner while another composer grumbled into his music, trying to keep her knees from bouncing restlessly beneath her skirts as she waited.  The composer, a modestly-dressed man with a neat beard and dark eyes, couldn't seem to find a resolution to the aria he was writing that satisfied him.  After a time, he snatched up all his sheet music, stormed over to the hearth, and flung it into the fire before turning to Nannerl and bowing deeply.  "I cede the bench to you, Signora," he sneered before stalking out of the room.

Nannerl rolled her eyes as she began unpacking her own music and arranging it on the harpsichord.  At least that proved that Wolfgang wasn't the strangest of the composers who wrote for the emperor.

La Cavalieri arrived exactly on time, slipping into the room so gently that Nannerl didn't hear her enter.  Nannerl had already gone over all the music she had thought to bring and, remembering the aria the moody composer had burned, was idly composing a variation on it with a resolved ending when she was interrupted by a gasp.  Worried that the composer himself had returned and taken offense, Nannerl sprang to her feet and spun around.

"Signorina Mozart!" La Cavalieri said.  It was hard to tell whether it was a greeting or an announcement.  "But... that was Maestro Salieri's opera, wasn't it?"

Nannerl shot a guilty glance at the fireplace, then back at the singer.  La Cavalieri was a small, stout woman, shorter even than Nannerl herself, with a round face, a pointed chin, and piercing blue eyes.  But even as Nannerl fumbled for an excuse as to why she had infringed on someone else's work, a smile broke across La Cavalieri's lips.  "The maestro has been laboring over the ending of that aria for weeks," she said, "and you finished it in an afternoon?"

"Well- I wouldn't say I finished it, exactly," Nannerl stammered.

But La Cavalieri hurried forward, seizing both of Nannerl's hands in her own.  "It's true, then?  I've always heard rumors that you were your brother's equal in talent."

"Me?  Wolfgang's equal?  Surely not!  After all his training- and I haven't even performed since-"

"Oh! How rude of me!" La Cavalieri interrupted, dropping Nannerl's hands at once and stepping back, the color rising in her cheeks.  "To insist on talking business when I haven't even introduced myself  You must think me terribly foolish!"

"Not at all!  You need no introduction, Fraulein Cavalieri," Nannerl said with a curtsy.

"Please, you of all people can call me Caterina.  And you- Signorina Maria Anna Mozart!  I was a child the last time we met."

"We've met?  Really?" Nannerl asked, dropping onto the bench and patting the seat at her side.  She had heard La Cavalieri sing in one of Wolfgang's operas the last time she had come to Vienna, but had never had the chance to hear her speak.  It was enchanting to watch her eyes sparkle as she leaned forward enthusiastically, with all the cold gravitas she displayed onstage melted away.

"I was at one of your last performances," La Cavalieri said, lowering her voice conspiratorially.  "You were a girl, I think, maybe fourteen?  And I was only ten!"

"Really?  And you remember it?"

She nodded, her eyes still wide.  "Every moment of it!"

"I couldn't have been that good, surely."

"You were!" La Cavalieri assured her, "but that wasn't what struck me.  I was only a child, you know, but I already loved music.  I sang while I worked. I sneaked out at night to linger outside concert halls.  It was all so futile!  I always thought music must be a man's realm.  I certainly thought it was reserved for adults.  But you!  You were hardly older than me, and you were a girl!  And you played so beautifully!  I was changed after I saw you perform.  It was the first true inspiration I had, the first glimpse of what was possible for a girl like me.  Why, I owe you my career!"

"Me?" Nannerl said, searching the little soprano's warm face for any trace of a lie, of empty flattery, and finding only overt admiration.  "Are you sure you aren't remembering Wolfgang's playing and confusing it with mine?"

La Cavalieri seized her hands again, folding them under her chin.  "You were a prodigy then," she said gravely, holding Nannerl's gaze, "and you're still a genius today.  Just look!  You've already proven yourself a more talented composer than Maestro Salieri himself!"

"Fraulein, I think your memory and your misplaced esteem for me are clouding your perception," Nannerl insisted, pulling her hands away.  Her cheeks were burning, though it was hard to pinpoint why the singer's compliments unsettled her so.

La Cavalieri rose from the bench with a sigh, smoothing her skirts into place and taking up her position by the harpsichord.  "I'm sorry if I've upset you, Signorina," she said, her chin held high.  In one move, she had become the perfect little diva again, poised to perform.

"Call me Nannerl, please.  I'm not upset!  Just... surprised."

The warm light seeped back into La Cavalieri's eyes as she said, "Nannerl.  How lovely."

Nannerl leaned down to retrieve a piece of music that had slid to the floor, pressing the back of her free hand to her burning cheek while she was out of La Cavalieri's line of sight.  How had all this flattery managed to fluster her so deeply?

"Did you bring any of your own compositions?"

Nannerl sat up, clearing her throat and hoping that the flush had begun to fade from her cheeks.  "A few.  I haven't composed new music since I was a child, though.  At least, nothing that I could perform."

"Go on!" urged La Cavalieri.  "Let me sing the newest one you have.  Something that you've never heard sung before."

"Well, there's this one," Nannerl said, passing her a page.  It was an aria she had written while her father was sick, a woman's lament as she struggles with the warring notions that she owes a man everything while she still has every right to hate him.  The words she had set to it were in Latin, some small insurance that any of the staff who might have overheard her singing it to herself wouldn't be able to guess that the subject matter was so ungrateful.

La Cavalieri took the page eagerly, scanning it with that inextinguishable enthusiasm.  "Oh," she sighed as she reached the end, "how true!  How very true!  Please, can I sing it?"

"Of course.  And if- if you think of any revisions, please let me know."  Nannerl struck the first note on the harpsichord and closed her eyes, imagining that the sharp chords were replaced by an orchestra.

When La Cavalieri's powerful voice took up the first word of her aria, Nannerl's eyes flew open again and she very nearly hit a sour note.  The emotion, the grandeur in the enormous voice that was resonating from within such a small woman!  She could hardly believe that this was what her aria sounded like, that Caterina Cavalieri had looked at her disjointed writing and seen something so relatable, that she could add so many layers of confusion and sorrow to this silly, self-indulgent song Nannerl had written in secret.

By the time she reached the end of the crescendo, the final note of the aria, Nannerl's fingers had gone completely still.  She was staring rather foolishly, her lips parted, her eyes stinging.

Caterina clasped the sheet of music over her heart and heaved a long, contented sigh.  "I knew it," she murmured, her expression still dreamy.  "Your brother has never written anything like this."  And while Nannerl continued to gape wordlessly at her, she rounded the harpsichord and took a seat on the bench at her side.  "Would you write an opera?  An entire opera, just like this?"

"An- an opera?" Nannerl repeated hoarsely.  "Me?"

"Beautiful music like this can't stay trapped in your head, Nannerl Mozart.  All of Vienna should know about your talent.  All of the world!"

Nannerl suddenly realized that she was leaning in toward the other woman, staring at her lips, at the mouth from which that overwhelming voice carried her music.  She sat up straight; her heart was pounding in her chest as though she had just run up a flight of stairs.  She shot a quick glance toward the clock on the mantel and cleared her throat.  "I- I fear we may run out of time on our lesson if we don't-"

"Can I see you again?" Caterina interrupted.

"Another lesson?"

"If you like," the singer said, returning the page of music to the stand and taking one of Nannerl's hands in hers.  "Or dinner.  Or a walk in the gardens."

Nannerl's eyes widened; she curled her fingers around Caterina's and caught her eye, studying her upturned face.  Did she mean to suggest-?

The image of the stately, tarnished pipe organ arose in Nannerl's thoughts. It had gone untouched for years, yet with a little attention and work, now it brought the members of the underground order together in song each night.  Could Nannerl's talent be revived just as easily?  Could she really write an entire opera after having pushed the music she heard in her head aside for so many years?

Caterina brought their joined hands to her lips and murmured, "Do you have any plans for this evening, Maestra?  Can we meet again?"

And that was all she needed to know.  Nannerl clapped her free hand to the back of Caterina Cavalieri's neck and pulled her into a long, deep kiss.


	8. Ego Trip

Signor Bonno had been dead for a fortnight when the emperor finally made an announcement about the open Kapellmeister position: each of the applicants would mount a full opera in the space of a month, and the composer of the emperor's favorite offering would secure the post.  It was a reckless, stupid proposition as far as Salieri was concerned.  Everyone who participated was going to be doomed to produce work well beneath their talent.  There was only one person capable of writing perfect music that quickly, and Salieri had no intention of losing this title to the likes of Wolfgang Mozart.

But Salieri's talent had never paid any heed to his intentions.  It had been weeks since he had been able to successfully finish a composition, to the point where he was half-convinced that he would never be able to put his name on anything again.  He spent entire days hunched over his music, sometimes at the palace, sometimes at home, rarely to any success. With every sour note, Salieri could feel his grip loosen a little more.  And what was it that he was losing hold of?  What would happen if he just let go?

The worst part of it was that he knew exactly what had changed, what had robbed him of his inspiration, and he couldn't bear to face it.  He told himself that in another week, in another day, in another hour, his thoughts would normalize again, but it didn't come.  Every ending eluded him.

Maybe Mozart deserved the Kapellmeister position anyway.  

He had spent the morning working at home to no avail.  When a passing maid had caused a floorboard to creak just loudly enough to break his concentration, Salieri had sprung to his feet and swept all of his music onto the floor, accidentally upsetting his inkwell in the process.  He had stood motionless for a moment as the liquid pooled black across the floor, staining each page it touched, and fancied that it was an apt representation of obsolescence slowly encroaching on his career.  Before the ink could reach the last page of music, he had snatched up his coat and stormed out of the house. 

It was not easier to work at the palace: harder even, perhaps, for here Salieri didn't have the luxury of kicking the furniture or hurling knickknacks against the wall when the notes he needed insisted on dancing out of reach.  What would his colleagues think if they knew how often his staff had had to sweep shards of porcelain out of the corners of his parlor?  He knew they saw him as moody, but he had at least managed to cultivate an aura of detached disinterest whenever he showed himself in public.  Beneath the mask of calm, he felt himself falling apart.  If he could just finish this opera, if he could just secure this position, maybe that would be enough.

The music rooms were crowded with applicants to the Kapellmeister position that day, along with eager divas, musicians and librettists hoping to inspire the piece that would earn the future Kapellmeister his status.  Salieri wasn't sure why he had expected anything less.  He had opened the door to his favorite salon only to have half a dozen heads turn in his direction, a few people even leaping to their feet as though they wanted to intercept him.  Salieri closed the door and hurried out of the palace entirely, doing his best to lose himself in the gardens.

There were just as many people out here as there had been in the music rooms, but at least they were spread out among the neatly-maintained rows of greenery and the strategically-placed statues and fountains.  At least the rustle of the breeze as it passed through the bushes did something to muffle their voices.  Salieri breathed deeply, concentrating on the beat of his even footsteps, on the trill of birdsong, on the rumbling bass of hushed conversation.  Perhaps there was already an opera here, hidden in plain sight.  If only he could work quickly enough to find it.

"Salieri, my friend, is that you?" called a familiar voice.

The tenuous illusion of productivity snapped.  Salieri clenched both fists, grinding them against the sides of his legs before he looked up, steeling himself.  "Rosenberg," he answered thinly.

"How good to see you here, my friend, how very good!" the count said, holding his walking stick aloft as he hurried toward him.  Gottlieb Stephanie trailed in his wake, already simpering.  He had a libretto clutched against his chest.

"Signor Stephanie."

"Maestro Salieri!" Stephanie replied, dropping into a ridiculously low bow.  "What a lovely day for a walk in the gardens, isn't it?  I admit, I'm overly excited to be back at the palace; after all, I haven't been here since die Entführung aus dem Serail, and-"

"Psst!" Rosenberg hissed.  He cut him off with a wave of his hand.

Stephanie mumbled, "Oh! Pardon me!" and fell silent.

Salieri crossed his arms, looking back and forth between them and bracing himself.  For a beat, the two of them just stood there facing him, Rosenberg with his eyes narrowed and Stephanie anxiously drumming his fingers over the book in his arms.  Well, if Stephanie wasn't going to come out and ask him, he certainly wasn't going to make it any easier on him.  "Enjoy your return to the palace, Signor Stephanie," Salieri said, stepping around them and attempting to continue on his way.

The moment he had passed them, he heard a scuffle that culminated in the crack of Rosenberg's staff against a hard surface--hopefully the ground and not Stephanie's skull.

"Eh- Herr Salieri?  A moment, please?" Stephanie called.

Salieri rolled his eyes and exhaled slowly before he turned on his heel.  "Well?"

"Only, I was hoping that you might be participating in the contest, and if you were participating, perhaps-" he held out the libretto he had been clutching, "-perhaps you needed a story to set to your famous music?"

Behind him, Rosenberg planted both hands atop his walking stick and turned up his nose, mumbling something about the quality of the last opera Stephanie had written.

Salieri shot him a hard look until he fell silent.  "Unfortunately," he told Stephanie, "I've already agreed to work with Signor Da Ponte. Perhaps another time?"

Stephanie's shoulders slumped at the news; Rosenberg harrumphed.  "After Figaro and that wretched Don Giovanni, I'm surprised to hear that you haven't given up on your countryman yet, my dear Salieri," he said.

"It's an entertaining story!" Stephanie said, holding out the libretto again.  "Full of intrigue and heartbreak!  It's called Gefährliche Liebschaften, taken from the French novel about-"

"About a noblewoman who challenges her former lover to seduce a woman famous for her piety?" Salieri interrupted.  "Les Liaisons dangereuses?"

"You- you've read it?"

Salieri shook his head.  "I've read Le relazioni pericolose, Da Ponte's libretto taken from the same novel.  It's the one he brought me for the Kapellmeister contest."

Stephanie's hands shook for a moment, and suddenly the libretto he had been holding dropped to the ground.  "But... he said he wasn't going to..." Stephanie breathed, his eyes round.

Salieri cleared his throat and nodded.  "Good day, Signor Stephanie, Signor Rosenberg," he said quickly.  He had come to the palace to clear his head, and he certainly wasn't going to stand here and watch Gottlieb Stephanie burst into tears over a rejected libretto.

"No, you don't understand!" Stephanie called, seizing Salieri by one arm.  "I told Da Ponte I was going to adapt les Liaisons dangereuses weeks ago, and he'd never even heard of the novel.  He asked to borrow my copy!"

"You're accusing the court librettist of plagiarizing your idea?" Rosenberg asked sharply.

Salieri pulled his arm free, straightening his jacket and fixing Stephanie with the darkest stare he could muster.  "Then let us hope that you will find a better composer than me to set the original libretto to music.  Good day, Signori."

They didn't stop him again, for now they were too busy bickering over whether or not Lorenzo Da Ponte was foolish enough to have intentionally stolen Stephanie's libretto idea in an effort to undermine him.  It seemed ridiculous to Salieri: Da Ponte was an accomplished, respected librettist who was already the emperor's favorite author and poet.  What good would it do him to steal an idea from a man who had only worked with Mozart a few times many years ago and hadn't managed to get anything commissioned since?  If anything, Stephanie should be the one stealing Da Ponte's work and trying to pass it off as his own.

So lost was he in his thoughts that Salieri didn't realize he had left the orderly English-style garden with its well-trimmed bushes and straight paths and had wandered onto one of the overgrown, winding paths of the French-style garden.  Comparing Da Ponte's talent to Stephanie's was bringing him dangerously close to thinking of the one ungrateful man who seemed capable of transcribing the music of the heavens as easily as he breathed.  The man he had done his best to avoid remembering for these past few weeks since he had given up going to the underground ball.  Since he had burned his mask and lost his inspiration.

Perhaps he would have been able to successfully distract himself if he hadn't rounded a corner and tripped over that very man's outstretched legs, falling flat onto his face in the dirt.  Mozart was sitting on the ground next to a gnarled rosebush, an empty piece of parchment on his lap and a quill in his hand.  Eyes wide, he scrambled to his feet, spluttering, "Maest- Herr Salieri!  Excuse me, I'm sorry!  I didn't expect anyone else to come out this far!"

Salieri rose as gracefully as he could, ignoring Mozart's outstretched hand.  "Mozart," he said curtly, brushing dirt off his palms and elbows to hide the flush that had suddenly risen in his face.  Of all the people he could have encountered at this particular moment!  Salieri was beginning to regret leaving the house at all.

"Oh, you're bleeding!" Mozart gasped, dropping to his knees before him and inspecting a tear in his stocking.  "If only I'd heard you approach!  I'm so sorry!"

Salieri stepped back, clearing his throat and casting an anxious glance around the path.  If only someone else would come along to bring him to his senses!  It was hard not to remember the other times Mozart had knelt before him in the dark dressing room above the underground ball.  He stole a glance at Mozart's mouth, but tore his gaze away at once, focusing instead on the dusty remains of a birds' nest at the center of the rosebush.  That hadn't been him, he told himself firmly.  It had never happened, none of it.

Before Mozart could make the same connection, Salieri gestured to his sheet of parchment.  "You're entering the contest?  For the Kapellmeister position?"

"I guess," Mozart said, sitting back on his heels with a huff.  "I haven't found a libretto I like, but I've thought of a few melodies nonetheless."  A pucker appeared between his brows as his gaze traveled from Salieri's scraped knee up the length of his body.  "I- I've missed your company," he said quietly.

"I find it easier to work at home than in the palace," said Salieri sharply.  A terrible thought had just occurred to him: what if Stephanie brought Mozart his Liaisons dangereuses libretto?  What if Salieri and Mozart entered the contest with operas based on the same story?  Mannaggia a Da Ponte!  If only Salieri could enter Mozart's ideas into the contest as his own the way Da Ponte had stolen Stephanie's, perhaps he'd have a chance of securing the position that everyone knew he deserved.

Mozart extended a hand again, his fingers outlining the stinging wound on Salieri's kneecap.  "I wasn't talking about the palace and you know it," he muttered.  "Some of us aren't too afraid to go after the things we want, you know."

Salieri's eyes fell on the quill, abandoned on the ground with the blank piece of parchment.  Well, what did he want above all else?  And what was holding him back?  Who was standing in his way?  

And just like that, his thoughts arranged themselves into a pattern.

"Signor Mozart," he blurted suddenly, "have you ever worked with a fellow composer on an opera?"

"I've done a lot of things with a fellow composer," said Mozart petulantly, his hand coming to rest at the back of Salieri's knee.  "Though composing an opera isn't one of them."

Fighting the urge to step out of Mozart's reach, Salieri said, "Well?  Let's subvert this ridiculous competition of the emperor's.  Let's compose an opera together.  I already have a libretto penned by your friend Da Ponte."

"Seriously?" Mozart asked, pulling Salieri's leg until he stepped closer.  "All that time working together, just the two of us?  You want that?"

Salieri frowned down at Mozart's tousled hair.  Was there no way to convince him that the person he had met in the underground ball was someone else?  He was Antonio Salieri, author of the Austrian emperor's favorite operas.  Wasn't that enough grounds for a partnership?  Why did Mozart need him to be this vile libertine as well?  He reached out suddenly, raking his fingers through Mozart's hair and yanking his head back, studying the other composer's upturned face.  It would be much easier to just kill him.  If Mozart were dead, there would be no one to threaten his victory in the emperor's competition, no matter how dreary his own opera turned out to be.

But there was too much life dancing in Mozart's mischievous brown eyes.  For a moment, Salieri fancied he could see the unfinished symphonies that must be swirling around in his thoughts.

It was too good: a secret partnership, a scheme to undermine the emperor himself when his two top picks for the Kapellmeister position revealed that they had written one entry together, forcing him to either choose both of them or to abandon the constraints of the competition altogether.  At least, that was what he would tell Mozart.  For when this opera, this sublime creation, was ready to be mounted and performed, only one name would be given the credit.  Salieri would see to that.  Salieri would see to it that no one would believe jealous Wolfgang Mozart's claims that he had written the themes that made Salieri's Le relazioni pericolose so successful, so eternal.  No one would be left to take Mozart's side when the emperor named Salieri Kapellmeister.

The hand at the back of Salieri's knee twitched and began to slide up the length of his thigh.  A grin broke across Mozart's face as he leaned forward on his knees, coaxing Salieri closer still.  "That's what you want?" he asked again.  "Me and you?"

A shiver coursed through Salieri's body at the first tickle of Mozart's hot breath across the front of his breeches.  He twisted his fist in Mozart's hair, his defenses finally crumbling when he heard him grunt in pain.  He cast another glance around the deserted French side of the garden before unfastening his breeches with his free hand and thrusting into Mozart's waiting mouth, a sharp sigh hissing between his teeth at the familiar feel of his tongue, his throat.  If this was the price of keeping his own music alive, then so be it.  His soul for his work, the heat of hell, the heat of Mozart's mouth, and in exchange, that piece of him, his work, would never die.  Someday, his name would outshine that of the lewd little man kneeling at his feet.


	9. Besoin d'amour

"Give me a song," Caterina said.  She scooted closer in the bed, that shining smile spreading across her face.

Nannerl just studied her for a moment, letting the melody fall together.  She ran her hand up the length of her side, her fingertips just grazing her ivory skin, unable to hold back a contented sigh.  "Something new?"

"Something for us."

"Something beautiful, then," she murmured, catching her lips in a quick kiss.  She pressed one finger against Caterina's side.  "This is mi."

Caterina dropped her head back onto the pillow and hummed the note.  Even when she was trying to be quiet, her voice had a pure tone that left Nannerl breathless.  She tapped a second finger alongside the first, and Caterina lowered her pitch to re.  Slowly, one note at a time, Caterina was able to hum the tune in Nannerl's heart.

It was hard to keep track of how many days had passed since their lesson at the palace.  After Nannerl had kissed her and Caterina had kissed her back, gripping Nannerl's waist and nearly knocking her off-balance, Caterina had breathlessly offered her a ride home in her coach.  Of course, the two of them had ended up passing the Gods Eye entirely and disembarking together at the garret room Caterina rented on the outskirts of town.  When evening began to fall and the thought of leaving her bed felt like a death sentence, Nannerl sent a letter to Frau Weber saying that she had some business to attend to regarding her father's estate, and that she was heading out of town for a short time to meet a business associate.

Rain was rushing over the roof above them, pouring past the room's one high window and obscuring every indication that there was a world on the other side of these four walls.  Nannerl finished the piece and pushed Caterina onto her back, clambering to her knees and throwing one leg over her waist.  "Sing it again," she urged as Caterina's hands came to rest at her hips.

She sat back, watching the rise and fall of her breasts as she hummed through the little melody again, as her hands moved up Nannerl's sides and back down her bare stomach, sliding along the lengths of her thighs and coming to rest behind her knees, pulling her closer.

"What words will you set to it?"

"I never wrote words, not seriously," Nannerl said.  She leaned down and pressed a kiss to the skin between her breasts.  "But this one would be about love."

That earned another languid smile.  Caterina cupped her head in her hands and drew her up until their lips met, Nannerl's loose hair falling alongside their faces like a curtain.  Nannerl closed her eyes as that warm flush spread through her veins again, matching the rhythm of their tongues as she rocked her hips against Caterina's.  Everything was so easy with her, so right.  The music, the laughter, the heat between them.  She had sneaked around with ladies' maids and a few of her father's pupils back in Salzburg, but nothing had ever been like this.

Just as she was slipping her hand between their bodies and trailing a path down Caterina's stomach, someone knocked at the door. "Fraulein Cavalieri!"

Caterina sat up in surprise, nearly knocking Nannerl off her and breaking the warm tension.  She clapped a hand over Nannerl's mouth and hissed, "My landlady!"

"Fraulein Cavalieri," the voice shouted again, "I know you're in there!  Herr Salieri is downstairs.  He says you've missed nearly a week's worth of lessons."

Caterina rolled her eyes and dropped her forehead to Nannerl's collarbone, her warm breath ghosting over her breasts.  Swallowing a giggle, Nannerl carded her fingers through her waves of dark hair.  Could they have really passed an entire week together?  Salieri had to have been exaggerating.

The landlady struck the door another blow and threatened, "Don't force me to use my spare key, Fraulein!  He came here himself to see you.  He said he has to mount his most important opera yet and needs you to sing for him!"

"Tell him I've kidnapped you," Nannerl whispered, her lips grazing Caterina's ear.  "Tell him you only sing for me now."  She kissed Caterina's temple, but unwound her arms from her waist and crawled off of her lap.  Her music and Caterina's voice were stunning together, but she wasn't a real musician.  She couldn't support Caterina's career the way the emperor's favorite composer could.

Caterina groaned and clambered off the bed, retrieving her shift and dressing gown from the floor where Nannerl had thrown them that morning when they got back from the market.  She twisted her long hair off her back and pinned it up beneath a plain cap.  "I don't want to sing his heartless opera," she grumbled.  

"Fraulein, I can hear your voice!" barked the landlady, banging on the door again for good measure.

Without putting on the rest of her clothes, Caterina stormed across the room and slammed her own fist on the other side of the door.  "Why don't you ask his majesty what's so urgent that I can't have one week of rest, Frau Grandsart?  If he's just begun his silly opera, it won't be ready for rehearsal for weeks, now will it?"

"But it will!  He only has a month until the curtain has to rise!  Didn't you hear?  The emperor is hosting an opera festival!"

"It isn't my fault that he got such a late start," Caterina pointed out.  "It has nothing to do with me."

"Will you come down and speak to the man or not?"

"I'm undressed!  He'll have to wait!"

"I'll tell you're on your way, then.  Good day, Fraulein Cavalieri."

Once the landlady had retreated, Caterina turned her back to the door and spread her arms.  "Am I presentable enough for the future Kapellmeister?"

"Stockings and shoes?" Nannerl suggested.  "And you may want to wash your hands."

"My hands?"

"Well, after the morning we've had... if the maestro greets you by kissing your knuckles..."

Caterina brought her own fingers to lips experimentally, her eyes widening.  "Oh!"

"It's a distinctive smell," Nannerl said.  "Believe me, men recognize it right away."

"I doubt Maestro Salieri would."  She went over to the basin anyway and began scrubbing at her fingers.

"Really?"

Caterina rolled her eyes.  "You haven't met him, have you?"

"Not formally.  I know Wolfgang likes him."

"Precisely," muttered Caterina.  She dried her hands and scowled at her fingers.  "I like the smell of you better.  And I like your music better."  She sat on the edge of the bed and yanked on a stocking.

Nannerl slid over to her side and buried a kiss against her neck.  "I'll still be here when he leaves," she murmured.  "I haven't got any obligations here in Vienna.  Just you."

Caterina threw herself back onto the bed, seized Nannerl by the arm, and pulled her down on top of her.  "These past few days have been wonderful.  Just the two of us."

"Hmm," Nannerl agreed, pressing her ear to Caterina's chest and listening to the thump of her heart.  "But the rest of the world had to catch up to us eventually."

"Have you ever dreamed of going someplace beyond the reach of men?  A sanctuary, an island where only women were allowed?"

Nannerl sat up.  Of course!  Why hadn't she thought of it before?  She sprang to her feet, quickly gathering up her own clothes and dropping them on the bed next to Caterina.  "There is such a place," she said, tugging her shift over her head and slipping on her stays.  She turned around so Caterina could lace her up.  "I'll take you there."

"Do you mean it?  Here in Vienna?  Let's go now!"

"But Herr Salieri is waiting downstairs.  After you meet with him-"

"To hell with Salieri," Caterina said haughtily, giving the cord of Nannerl's stays a final pull.  "We'll take the servants' exit out through the alley."

It was hard to hold in her laughter as Nannerl crept down the shadowy staircase behind Caterina, both of them tiptoeing and holding their shoes in one hand.  Caterina had left a note on the door instructing the landlady tell Maestro Salieri that she had another commitment and would not be able to star in his current project.  Somehow, the idea of spurning the dark-eyed man Nannerl had seen fling his score into the fire at the palace struck her as hilarious.  He seemed like the sort of person who was used to throwing a tantrum until he got what he wanted.  But he wasn't going to have Caterina's voice.  Not this time.

They kept their eyes down as they hurried out of the alley and away from the boarding house, darting from doorway to doorway to avoid the rain and hailing a coach as soon as they knew they turned the corner.  They arrived at the Gods Eye damp, giggling, and just in time for dinner.  Frau Weber was delighted to welcome a visitor to her table, though her eyebrows shot up at the name Cavalieri and she cast a calculating glance at her eldest daughter.  Aloysia's face was unreadable. 

News of the upcoming opera festival dominated the conversation at the dinner table.  It seemed that every composer in Austria had come into town to participate; even Josepha had been asked to sing for a fellow who had come all the way from Innsbruck.  She and Sophie chatted excitedly about what kinds of stories they had heard were being adapted, and which shows would run in which theaters.  Constance and Aloysia both ate in silence.  Nannerl and Caterina were quiet too, listening to the conversation and trying to work out what they had missed while they had been shut away in their fantasy.  Wolfgang was not at the table.  When Nannerl asked where he was, a muscle in Constance's jaw jumped and Frau Weber dismissively said that he, too, had been called away to deal with business regarding their father's estate.

"Aloysia," Constance said suddenly, her tone resolute but ragged, "may I stay in the parlor with your friends this evening?"

Nannerl glanced back and forth between the sisters.  How much did the rest of the Weber family know about Aloysia's visitors and the crypt?  But Aloysia merely shrugged, that same icy look on her face.  "If you wish." She turned her hard stare on Nannerl.  "And your guest?"

Before she had to ask, Caterina gracefully intervened.  "My dear Signora Lange," she said, "I just heard from Maestro Salieri that he needs a soprano for the opera he's creating for the emperor's festival.  Perhaps you'd like to propose your candidacy?"

For the briefest of moments, Nannerl could see a chink in Aloysia's carefully-constructed armor.  Her eyes widened; she looked from Caterina to Nannerl and back, then squinted suspiciously.

"I'd do it myself, but I unfortunately have another commitment," Caterina went on.  Her foot brushed Nannerl's under the table.  "And, after all, I do owe you a favor for introducing me to Maestra Mozart."

Aloysia's eyebrow quirked, but she only said, "Perhaps I will."

The guests began to arrive as the dinner was cleared away.  Nannerl and Caterina excused themselves to the parlor.  The dancers and singers of the underground order recognized La Cavalieri, of course, gathering around her with that eager light in their eyes when they realized that the star of the Burgtheater was one of them after all.  Nannerl clung to Caterina's hand a little too tightly: she knew these women, but there was something overwhelming about being at the center of a cluster of tall, elegant dancers.  There were beautiful faces, long arms, and delicate collarbones everywhere she looked.  It was Constance who broke through the crowd eventually, asking Nannerl to lead the way to the church since Aloysia had some business to attend to and wouldn't be joining them until later.

Caterina was the one clinging to Nannerl's hand as they passed through the stuffy basement and into the underground passage.  Nannerl couldn't resist titling her single candle toward her, gauging her reaction as they made their way through the hidden tunnel, past the chambers of the long-dead and the intricate roots of trees that had been razed during the construction of the Gods Eye.  They made their way around the collapsed section of the chapel floor, the shattered tiles crunching underfoot, and up the crooked concrete staircase to stand in the abandoned church.

Caterina looked at the soaring ceiling and faded stained glass in awe, her grip on Nannerl's hand so tight that she could feel her pulse in her fingertips.  She dropped her gaze just in time to see the seamstress Charlotte cup Benedikta's hand in her cheek; beyond them, Tatiana's maid had seized her mistress by her shoulders and pinned her to the wall, kissing her deeply while Tatiana clumsily unlaced the back of her dress.  Caterina swallowed, then looked up at Nannerl with shining eyes.  "A sanctuary," she whispered.

"With no men allowed."

"I'd drink to that," Constance muttered.  She brushed past them and dropped to a seat at the cards table.  "Does anyone want to play Scat with me?"

Caterina tugged at Nannerl's arm.  She had spotted the old organ on the other side of the cards table, and she gestured to it, asking, "Can you play our song on that?"

It was a perfect evening.  Nannerl played through every melody that had been in her heart since she had met Caterina, and then the aria she had sung during their lesson at the palace.  Caterina was seated on the bench beside her, her head resting on her shoulder and one arm around her waist as she sang along, inventing lyrics where there had never been any before.  From behind her, she could hear the soft voices of Constance and a few musicians as they played cards; beyond that, the low, languid sighs of Tatiana and Zahera, of Benedikta and Charlotte.  She only wished she could conduct a delicate strings section to accompany the mood within the chapel rather than playing this brash, stately organ.

She had run out of relevant songs and begun improvising something new when Aloysia suddenly appeared at her other side, her mouth set into a grim smirk.  

"You're here!" Nannerl beamed, lifting her hands from the keys and letting the music fall silent.

Aloysia studied her for a moment, then looked past her at Caterina.  "Are you ready to earn your place in my order, Cavalieri?"

"What do you mean?" Caterina asked.  She sat up, her arm still around Nannerl's waist.  "I thought you were going to ask Salieri-"

"You're going to take the role," interrupted Aloysia, "but then you'll back out the night before.  That way they'll have to ask me to sing as a last resort."

Caterina shifted uncomfortably.  "That's your plan?"

"Why don't you sing the role from the beginning?" asked Nannerl.  "Surely, working closely with the emperor's favorite composer is worth more than functioning as a surprise understudy for the lead role."

"I have a better idea!" Caterina declared.  She climbed up onto her knees, then stood on the bench at Nannerl's side, leaning on one of her shoulders for balance.  She gestured to the chapel and all the women assembled there.  "We've got dancers, musicians, and two sopranos right here, not to mention the great Maestra Mozart herself!  Let's write our own opera!"

A few of the women cheered; others put down their cards, watching Caterina with interest.

"Caterina, I've never-"

"Just for fun," Caterina went on.  "If we put it on at the same time as the emperor's opera festival, we could invite all the women who weren't allowed to participate in any of the other composers' projects.  We could steal their crowds!"  She looked down and caught Nannerl's eye.  "A sanctuary," she said again.  "An opera, just for us."

"And what if I don't want to sing with you?  What if I won't settle for second billing?" Aloysia asked sharply.

"No one's forcing you to participate," said Caterina.

Nannerl shook her head.  "None of us would deserve second billing.  If we all did a project together, then we all deserve equal credit." And, as the idea began to take shape, Nannerl climbed to her feet on the bench at Caterina's side.  "My brother could help us.  He's mounted plenty of operas in Vienna without first receiving a commission!  We just need a libretto."

At the far side of the chapel, Zahera sprang to her feet, smoothing her rumpled hair.  "Charlotte and I can sew!  We can make costumes!"

Tatiana stood too, calling, "Benedikta?  Will you help lead the dancers?"

"Of course!" replied the other ballerina, getting to her feet as well.

One by one, the women of the underground order rose and volunteered to join Caterina's project.  Nannerl's project.

"An opera just for us, by us," Caterina said, catching Nannerl's hand in hers.  "What do you think?"

Nannerl smiled at her, then looked out over the others.  "The emperor's opera festival doesn't stand a chance."


	10. Les uns contre les autres

For the first time in her adult life, Constance found that she had been left to her own devices.

Wolfgang was still away on business; meanwhile Josepha had managed to sweep the rest of her family up in the excitement of being cast in an opera that would play at the emperor's festival in two weeks, and Aloysia was busy with the opera that Nannerl and her order would be putting on in secret.  Constance sat in on their meetings sometimes for lack of anything better to do, but couldn't bear to stay for long.  The music Nannerl composed at the organ was haunting, and she had managed to scribble down dozens of melodies, but every day that they went without a libretto their rehearsals ran a little shorter and the look of impatience on Aloysia's face became a little harder to ignore.

One night, Constance decided not to descend into the catacombs at all.  She retrieved Wolfgang's leopard-spotted coat and a pair of his breeches from the back of her wardrobe, twisted her hair up beneath one of his hats, and she set off alone in the direction of the mollyhouse ballroom.

The dance was still going on as it always was, as if nothing had changed.  Constance half-expected to see Wolfgang's lavender coat weaving in and out among the guests, though the awkward, shrill tune being played on the violin in the corner was as good an indication as any that her husband was not here tonight.  She dropped into her usual bench with a sigh, leaning her head back against the wall.  Maybe she would finally accept a masked stranger's invitation to dance tonight.  Maybe that would be the distraction she needed to quell the dread that had been slowly building in her chest for weeks, for months, even since the day the emperor had announced that he was having Figaro withdrawn.  Ever since the day the light had gone out of Wolfgang's eyes.  Since the first time he had looked at her like he didn't know her at all.

"Herr Conrad!"

Constance's head jerked forward at the sound of the familiar voice, and she sprang to her feet when she saw who had greeted her.  "Herr Stephanie!"

Wolfgang's former librettist looked just as he had the last time she had come here with Wolfgang, even wearing the same blue jacket.  Constance couldn't help but notice that the elbows had gone a little shiny.  She averted her eyes, grateful to her mask for hiding her pity. Poor Herr Stephanie's work had fallen from the emperor's favor even before Wolfgang had begun work on Figaro.  How long must it have been since someone had commissioned a libretto from him?  "I'm delighted to see you again!" Herr Stephanie was saying, dropping into one of his deep bows.  "I was hoping you'd come back to us one of these nights."

"Were you indeed?  I'm afraid I've come without company for once," she admitted, casting an idle glance around the dancers again.  No spark of lavender.  Vienna seemed so dark whenever Wolfgang was away.

"No matter!" Herr Stephanie said. "It's no matter!  I've found someone I'd like you to meet!"

"You mean someone to meet Herr Conrad?" Constance asked cautiously.

"You'll see," he said with a wink.  "Come on!"

Constance rose to her feet and followed Herr Stephanie around the edges of the room, swerving every so often to avoid dizzy dancers.  In all the evenings she had come to the underground ball, Constance had never ventured so far from the exit.  She wondered if any of the other dancers had noticed her.  She wondered if she was still blending in.  When Herr Stephanie mounted the staircase at the far end of the room, opened the door for her, and bowed as she passed through, she suddenly realized that the two of them might look rather like a pair of lovers slipping away from the crowd for a moment alone.  For a tryst.  An unwelcome memory of Wolfgang sneaking out of the ballroom with the man in black arose, but Constance pushed it away and buried it.

Beyond the ballroom was a grand vestibule, though the main doors of the house were boarded shut and black fabric had been nailed over the windows on the inside.  A few lit candles had been left on dusty tables, their flames casting a dim glow that only offered hints at how magnificent this entryway had once been.  Herr Stephanie had told her once that this house had belonged to a baron who had lost his fortune and fled the country rather than face his debtors, and that the underground ball had been the idea of a pair of footmen who had awakened one morning to find their master and his carriage missing.

If the front doors of the manor could have been thrown open, an arriving guest would have seen the doors leading to the sunken ballroom directly ahead and entrances to the wings of the house on either side.  Above the ballroom was another grand doorway, with twin staircases winding along the walls and ending at either side of the main entrance.  Constance craned her neck, trying to guess what the door at the landing led to, and made out the shape of an enormous chandelier hanging in the center of the room, framed by the staircases.  She could hardly imagine what this house must have been like when the baron lived here, when parties had been accessed through this opulent vestibule instead of via a servant's corridor.

Herr Stephanie led her up one of the marble staircases, taking a candlestick with him to light their way.  On the high walls above them, faded portraits of the baron's ancestors looked down at the intruders, their judgmental gazes obscured by a layer of cobwebs.  Constance shivered, tugging Wolfgang's jacket tighter around her shoulders and jogging up the last few steps.  From below, there was a surge of music as a couple emerged from the underground ball, warm golden light spilling across the marble floor when they opened the doors.  Herr Stephanie paused, lifting his mask with his free hand and shooting a warning glance at Constance.  She nodded and remained still until the lovers disappeared down one of the darkened wings of the house and the sound of their laughter faded.

When the room was silent again but for the muffled echo of the revelry downstairs, Herr Stephanie removed his mask, stepped up to the grand doors at the top of the double staircase, and knocked.

After a moment, Constance could hear someone shuffling around on the other side.  She took another step toward Herr Stephanie, her imagination running wild.  What sort of person might have taken refuge at the top of this staircase, and why did Herr Stephanie want her to meet him?  She couldn't think of a single answer.  Just as she was wondering if it would be unseemly of her to grip his arm for support, one of the enormous doors creaked open and a masked face appeared on the other side.

Herr Stephanie cleared his throat and whispered, "Herr... Clarence?"

The stranger raised an elegant hand and removed the mask, answering in a musical voice, "If no one else is here, Herr Stephanie, you might as well call me Clara."

Clara?  There was another woman at the underground ball?  Constance snatched her own mask away from her face, unable to stop staring.  

It was true!  In the flickering glow of Herr Stephanie's candle, she could just make out the angular features and sharp brown eyes of the person standing on the other side of the heavy door.  Her dark hair was cut short and fell over her forehead in an unruly fringe; she was wearing an ill-fitting red jacket and a cravat, probably borrowed like Constance's.  She grinned when their eyes met.  "Herr Conrad, I presume," she said, pushing the door open wider.  "So I'm not the only one with a husband that prefers being buggered to sleeping next to me after all."

"In fairness," Stephanie said, clearing his throat, "the majority of the guests here have wives at home.  We just, ah, leave them... at home."

"Well, come in, both of you!" urged Clara.  "Goodness knows I could use the company."

Herr Stephanie held the door, stepping back and holding the candle aloft for Constance as she hesitantly followed Clara inside.  Once her back was turned, Constance was free to stare again.  Their guide was a slender woman, even bordering on frail, but she held herself with as much confidence as the dancers in the ballroom beneath their feet.  There was something about her that even reminded Constance of Wolfgang: her jawline, maybe, or her disheveled hair.  Maybe it was just the aura of simmering enthusiasm that surrounded her.  

Clara was leading her guests down a strange little passageway lined on one side with narrow doors, orderly numbers painted on each one in a faded shade of gold.  Ahead of them, a door stood open, and flickering light from within illuminated a slice of the corridor.

"Excuse me?  Herr- uh, Fraulein-?"

"Clara."

"Clara," Constance said, "Where- where are we, exactly?"

She glanced over her shoulder, her dark eyes dancing in the light from Herr Stephanie's candle.  "The boxes!  I used to play up here all the time when I was a child."

"When you were a child?" repeated Constance.  "But... how long have you been coming here?"

Behind her, Herr Stephanie let out one of his nervous giggles.  "She was born here!"

"Here?  Was- was your father-?"

Clara stopped by the open door and grinned, leaning conspiratorially toward Constance.  "My mother told me that my father was the old baron himself, but he was long gone by the time I had grown enough to look for a resemblance.  And she was just a housemaid, after all."  She gestured toward the door.  "Welcome to my box!"

After glancing once more at Herr Stephanie, Constance stepped through the open door and into the low light beyond.  She gasped at the view and sank into a chair.  It was a box, just as Clara had said: a box overlooking a private theater!  An old chandelier hung in the middle of the ceiling, laced with cobwebs which shone silver in the lamplight.  It alone must have been the size of a carriage!  Beyond it she could just make out the dim stage, its heavy, moth-eaten curtain riddled with stains.  Similar boxes were lined across the walls, and she could see plush benches at the ground level, even with the entryway below.  All this time, and the underground ball had been conducted each night beneath an abandoned theater!  What other secrets must this old house be hiding?

Clara dropped into the chair at Constance's side, crossing her arms on the rail and leaning forward to rest her chin in the crook of her elbow.  "I used to sit up here while mother worked, though I hardly remember what it looked like when anyone lived here.  Now I just like to think what it would be like if all the candles in the chandelier were lit and the benches were filled with people."

"I've never been to a house with its own theater," Constance said reverently.  "Could you even imagine living here?"  When Clara cocked an eyebrow at her, she couldn't help smiling.  "I mean, could you imagine being the master of this place?  Having shows performed for your friends whenever you wished?"

"I'd be happy just to have a show performed at all," muttered Herr Stephanie.

"Poor Herr Gottlieb!" Clara crooned, turning to face the librettist.  "I'm sure your opera would have been the highlight of the festival, if it hadn't been for those bastards stealing your idea."

Constance looked back at Herr Stephanie, who was wringing his hands and staring unhappily at the empty stage.  "What bastards?"

"Frau Clara, I wouldn't call them bastards, especially not when speaking to-"

"Don't be so modest!" Clara interrupted.  She raised her eyebrows at Constance, leaning forward as though she expected someone to overhear as she said, "The court librettist himself stole Herr Gottlieb's story and wrote his own libretto out of it, and now Maestros Salieri and Mozart are setting music to it anyway, knowing that it was stolen!"  

Mozart?  Constance gripped the rail tighter, leaning away.  What was this woman talking about?  A little gasp hissed between Stephanie's teeth at the sound of her husband's name, and he turned his wide-eyed stare on Constance.

"Well?  Isn't that what happened?" insisted Clara, oblivious.  "Mozart and Salieri-"

"More rumors!" Constance cried, throwing herself back in her seat with a huff.  "Herr Stephanie, what's all this about?  What did Wolfgang really do?"

"Look, this isn't really my business, not anymore, not really," Stephanie babbled.  "Yes, it's true Da Ponte stole my idea, and then Salieri wouldn't listen, it's a shame, certainly, it's a shame after all the work I put into Gefährliche Liebschaften, but something else will come along."  He nodded fervently, though the conviction didn't spread to his eyes.  "I'll wait until after the festival, I suppose.  Someone will buy it, somewhere.  It's... it's an entertaining story."

"If you have a libretto, take it to Wolfgang's sister," Constance suggested.  "She's staying with us at the Gods Eye and they need a plot for their opera."

"Who's Wolfgang?" asked Clara, earning another nervous titter from Herr Stephanie.

"My husband," Constance said coolly, "Wolfgang Mozart, the composer.  He's one of the bastards you mentioned."

To Constance's surprise, Clara swore loudly.  "You could have warned me!" she grumbled, shooting Herr Stephanie a dark look.

"But I tried!"

"Well that explains it, doesn't it?  If her husband is a partygoer too, at least we know why he's working with the likes of Salieri."

"Frau Clara-"

"Wolfgang's out of town at the moment, actually," Constance corrected her.  "That unfortunately pokes a hole in your slanderous little tale."

Clara sighed, leaning back in her seat and fixing a look of pity on Constance.  "Is she new to this?" she asked Herr Stephanie.

"Frau Clara, if-"

"My husband isn't a liar," interjected Constance, the words coming out a little more loudly than she had intended.  "He told me about this club, didn't he?  He's the one who brought me here.  So he trusts me!  Why would he say he was in Salzburg if he was secretly right here in Vienna stealing librettos with Maestro Salieri?"

"It's just a rumor, just like you said!" Herr Stephanie blurted.  His hands were clenched so tightly together that his knuckles were turning white.  "A servant who works for Salieri thought he saw Wolfgang in his chambers, that's all!  And with the way Salieri locks himself up when he's working on something, especially under pressure... but the man was probably mistaken!  I never should have repeated it to anyone, only... only I was so angry about the libretto.  I'm sorry, Frau Mozart!"

Constance took a long, slow breath, but still she felt indignation simmering in her blood as it coursed through her heart.  Herr Stephanie had pretended to be such a good friend to her all these evenings since Wolfgang had first brought her to the club, and now!  Now she knew the truth, that he had been spreading vile rumors about her husband just like everybody else.  She took another breath and turned her stinging eyes toward the shadowy theater.  Was there anybody left in this accursed city whom she could trust?

A pair of warm hands slid over hers, folding them together and patting them comfortingly.  Constance rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and blinked until the hot tears began to dry, then faced Clara's sympathetic gaze.

"Frau Mozart?" Herr Stephanie ventured.  "I really am sorry!  I shouldn't have-"

Clara shushed him and squeezed Constance's hands.  "Poor thing," she sighed.  "You still love your husband very much, don't you?"

"Of course I do!"

"He must be very kind," Clara said gently.  "But surely you understand the purpose of the party downstairs, don't you?  Herr Gottlieb said you've been coming for weeks.  You must have realized what your husband comes here to find."

Constance dropped her head, the image of their joined hands blurring.  It felt so much worse to hear someone else say it.  The thought of Wolfgang--earnest, kind Wolfgang--choosing to betray her, choosing to let someone else hold him, to let someone else's hands caress his skin, someone else's tongue into his mouth...!  She couldn't bear it.  She wouldn't stand for it.

As the roar in her ears began to recede, she realized Herr Stephanie was still talking.  "Please, please accept my apologies, Frau Mozart!  I never realized... I never meant to-"

"So you say Wolfgang and Maestro Salieri are together, writing an opera Herr Da Ponte stole from you?" Constance interrupted, her voice a little too sharp.

"It's merely a rumor based on-"

"Do you still have your version of the libretto?"

Herr Stephanie cleared his throat.  "Well- yes, of course, but-"

"Bring it to the Gods Eye tomorrow evening," Constance said, dropping Clara's hands and rising from her seat.  "Let Nannerl set it to music.  I don't care if Wolfgang is involved or not; Aloysia and her friends need a libretto and you need a composer.  If it's revenge you want on Maestro Salieri and Herr Da Ponte, this is your chance to mount an opera with the same story as theirs, but with music composed by a Mozart."  She cast another glance at the dusty theater and nodded.  "We can hold it here.  Between Aloysia's friends and the deviants downstairs, we can bring in at least as big a crowd as Maestro Salieri's opera.  Maybe bigger.  That's what you want, isn't it?"

Herr Stephanie merely nodded, staring at her with awe in his eyes.

"She's brilliant!" Clara proclaimed with a wide grin.  "We can certainly have this place cleaned up and ready before the emperor's festival begins!"  She sprang to her feet and pressed a noisy kiss to Constance's cheek.  "Such fire!"

Constance felt herself flush at the compliment, but she wasn't ready to let go of the rush of anger that had propelled her so far.  The pieces had fallen together so easily, so obviously, and the result would be an opera that would both please her family and disgrace the man who had taken Wolfgang's career from him.  The man who had taken Wolfgang from her.  She looked down at the empty stage once more, then at the unemployed librettist with his name to avenge, and at the woman who knew the secrets of the house and its private theater.  The woman with Wolfgang's jawline, with his smile, with his energy.  With that same mischievous spark in her brown eyes.

There was something else Aloysia would do right now, Constance thought, cupping a hand under Clara's chin.  She studied her upturned face for a moment, her long lashes, her pretty lips--but then she released her, letting her arm fall to her side.  She couldn't, she couldn't betray Wolfgang like that.  This could still be a misunderstanding.  Instead, she caught her gaze and winked, saying, "You can come to the house tomorrow night, too.  Our opera will need a manager."

Clara seized her hand and kissed it, then dropped into a low bow the way Herr Stephanie so often did.  "At your service, Herr Conrad," she said.  "I'd follow you anywhere."


	11. Quand on a plus rien à perdre

Gefährliche Liebschaften was the tale of a bored, manipulative noblewoman who, unable to admit to herself that she was in love with her friend, set him the challenge of seducing a pious woman and offered a night in her bed as a reward for his success. Aloysia had been assigned the role of the cunning marquise after reading only a few pages of the libretto; since there were no men in their little troupe, Caterina would play the notorious viscount. The only problem was that the marquise, despite being the main character, had a much smaller part than the viscount. At each rehearsal, Aloysia stationed herself in the front row of the chapel and crossed her arms, fixing her iron stare on Caterina while she sang.  Whenever Nannerl tried to bring it up, Caterina would wave her worries away.  Apparently she was used to being on the receiving end of Aloysia Lange's envy.

Rehearsals quickly became the focus of Nannerl's life.  She awoke well past noon each day, grabbed a scrap of bread left over from the Webers' breakfast, and made the half-hour walk to Caterina's rented room.  On days she remembered to bring her sheet music, they worked on the opera, writing the second act even while rehearsals for the first act were underway in the old chapel, Caterina's voice their only instrument.  More often than not, one of them would interrupt their work with a gentle kiss, a lingering touch, a heavy-lidded smile, and that would be the end of their progress for the day.  The music was beautiful.  Caterina was sublime.

Nannerl saw precious little of the Webers in that time.  Sometimes she and Caterina would arrive back at the Gods Eye in time for dinner, but they were often too late, heading straight for the passage to the catacombs with her latest pages of music under her arm.  Thanks to the watchful eye of Constance's friend Clara, their manager and director, rehearsal was usually underway by the time they arrived.  It was Clara who had bullied Aloysia into accepting the role of the marquise by loudly wondering if the music was too difficult for her to sing.  She was coordinating moving their rehearsals to a real theater in an abandoned mansion closer to the center of town.  She was also working as a go-between for the women in the troupe and the author of their libretto, who had reportedly said that he would rather not go crawling through a crypt in order to access their rehearsals and would join them once they were set up in the theater, thank you very much.

As they were cleaning up after their last night in the chapel, Nannerl spotted Constance sitting alone at the cards table, absentmindedly shuffling and reshuffling the same deck.  Head still spinning from the music, she dropped into the seat beside her.  "Constance, you've been in this private theater, haven't you?"

Constance nodded, only glancing up from the cards for a moment.

"There wouldn't happen to be an organ?"

"I don't think so," she murmured.  "But there's a clavichord in the ballroom downstairs.  Some of the men could bring it up.  Could you play that instead?"

"I suppose.  The music will lose some of its depth, but it won't sound quite so macabre, at least."  Nannerl leaned back in her seat and surveyed the room.  Caterina was pacing back and forth behind the altar, her face buried in sheet music and her brow furrowed in adorable concentration.  Zahara and Charlotte were sat in one of the back pews stitching together a few simple costumes, while Benedikta and Tatiana led the others in rehearsing a dance out in the vestibule.  "Where's Clara?"

"She and Herr Stephanie are speaking to some of the organizers at the mollyhouse."

"And you didn't go with them?"

Constance shook her head, then flinched when a sudden peal of laughter rang out from the dancers at the back of the chapel.  She stopped shuffling the cards and stared darkly at her hands. 

"Are you alright?" Nannerl asked.  Constance had certainly become more withdrawn than she had been when they first met, but Nannerl had never seen her quite so moody.  She edged her chair closer.  "What's the matter?" 

Constance looked up from the cards at last, her eyes piercing as she held Nannerl's gaze.  She seemed to consider her for a moment before finally asking, "What business does Wolfgang have in Salzburg?  Why has he been gone so long?"

"Salzburg?"

"He left on business relating to your father's estate the same time you did, but you've been back for more than a fortnight.  So where's Wolfgang?" 

There was something strange about Constance's demeanor, Nannerl realized.  Her golden curls hung loose and limp around her shoulders, dark circles framed her eyes, and her skin was sallow, as though she hadn't stood in the sunlight in weeks.  A wave of pity washed over her: what must she be going through?  She caught both of Constance's hands in her own and kissed them.  Wolfgang had left Constance alone and Nannerl, so caught up in her relationship with Caterina and her opera, had barely noticed.  She hadn't paid any mind to the way Constance picked at her dinner, to her heavy silences, to her red nose and puffy eyes whenever she emerged from the rooms she and Wolfgang should have been sharing.  "I don't know where he is," she admitted.  "Constance, I'm so sorry.  I lied.  There was no business to attend to. I never went to Salzburg.  And... I don't think Wolfgang did either."

Constance dropped her gaze and pulled her hands free, catching her lower lip between her teeth.

"Please forgive me, darling," Nannerl said.  "I'll help you find him.  Caterina's friends from the palace might-"

"I know where he is," interrupted Constance.  Her voice was sharp, her expression suddenly harder than Nannerl had ever seen it.

"You do?"

Constance nodded.  She stared at the pipe organ over Nannerl's shoulder, blinking as her eyes began to turn red, but her tone didn't change.  "He's with his lover."

"Oh! Oh, no! Constance, I'm so sorry!" Nannerl gasped.  She threw her arms around her, pulling her into a tight embrace.  "My poor sister!  How do you know?"

"Everyone knows!" snapped Constance.

Nannerl released her, holding her by her shoulders and studying her face again.  She had adored Constance from the moment she met her.  She was beautiful, sweet, and sunny, more than her silly little brother even deserved.  How could he have hurt her like this?  How could he live with himself knowing that he was the reason lovely Constance was suffering?  "Where is he?" she demanded.  "Tell me where he is.  Who is he with?"

Constance looked down at her lap again, at her clenched fists.  "Have- have you ever loved and hated someone at the same time?"

The question settled in Nannerl's gut like a stone, a familiar sentiment she had pushed away since she was a child.  Yes, she had loved and hated someone her whole life: her father.  Her father, who had given her everything and then forced her to forget it, pushed her into the shadows, pushed her toward suitors with foul breath and clammy hands while her brother became famous on a talent that was an echo of what Nannerl had once known she could do.  While Wolfgang wrote his sloppy music and called it perfect, while he earned the emperor's favor and the Constance Weber's heart, Nannerl had been tending to their father in his slow decline.  She had done nothing with her life; Wolfgang had been given everything and now he was squandering it.  Well, she wouldn't stand by and watch it happen.  Not anymore.  She caught Constance's face in her hands and forced her to meet her eye.  "Tell me.  I'll bring him home.  Who is he with?"

"He's with Maestro Salieri," Constance said, her voice cold.  "And... I don't want him to come home."

Salieri!  Of all the people in Vienna, Wolfgang had chosen to betray Constance with Salieri?  With his rival, with the same man who had spent years conspiring against him and undermining his work?

With a man whose address Caterina already knew.

Poor Constance excused herself and went upstairs to her empty rooms, but a fire was lit in Caterina's eyes as soon as Nannerl told her the news. 

It was nearly morning when the two of them arrived at Salieri's townhouse, one of a long row of identical old buildings on a quiet street.  Most of the neighbors had added personal touches like flower boxes and colorful shutters: only the house Caterina identified as Salieri's had been left so plain that from the street it looked uninhabited.

Caterina led her to the servants' entrance, where she rocked forward onto her toes and kissed her, wishing her luck. After ignoring the maestro's requests that she sing in his upcoming opera, Caterina didn't think it appropriate to break into his house in the dark of the night alongside his lover's sister.  She thought it best she wait at the door.

The servants' entrance led to a steep, shadowy staircase much like the one she and Caterina had used to sneak out of her rented room when Salieri had come calling.  At each floor, parallel doors could lead either into Salieri's house or into his neighbor's.  Nannerl moved quietly up to the second floor, where she was quite sure she could hear the sound of muffled conversation.  

The voice coming from a room at the back of the house was definitely Wolfgang's. The bedchamber door stood partially open, casting a swathe of dim candlelight across the hallway.  Nannerl moved gingerly toward it.  She hesitated--it was her last chance to forget all this and turn back--until she heard Wolfgang break into his irreverent giggle and the other man's voice reply, "Mozart, we need to work!"

How dare he sit here laughing when Constance was in such pain!  Nannerl flung the door open so forcefully that it slammed into the wall with a crash that even made Nannerl herself jump.

She had certainly come to the right place.  There was Wolfgang, frozen in wide-eyed shock, perched on his knees on a stately four-poster bed and clad only in a nightshirt.  Salieri was dressed the same, his hair loose and swept over one shoulder, sitting at the edge of the mattress with a little table pulled up to his lap.  Pages of messy composition littered its surface and the floor around them.  Wolfgang had been draped over him from behind, his hand wrapped around Salieri's and guiding the quill, his lips pressed to Salieri's exposed neck.  And now both of them were staring at her in horror.

Without giving herself time to change her mind, Nannerl charged into the room and seized Wolfgang by his ear, reaching right over Salieri's shoulder.  "You absolute dolt!" she cried, struggling against the expansive array of profanities that were on the tip of her tongue.  "You idiot!  You stupid boy!"

"Nannerl?  What are- how did you- ow!" Wolfgang stammered.  He managed to wrench himself free of her grip, clapping a hand over the side of his head and scrambling back toward the center of the bed, out of her reach.  "What are you doing here?"

"What are you doing here, you vulgar fool?  You've been here all this time?  Leaving poor Constance to cry and worry over you without so much as a word?"

"But Constance knows about us!" 

Salieri had slipped off of the bed and retrieved a housecoat, pulling it on and tying the sash even as he tried to retreat into a far corner of the room.  When Wolfgang gestured vaguely at him, he cleared his throat and turned a level gaze on Nannerl, though his hands were shaking.  "Signorina Mozart, if you don't remove yourself from my home at once, I shall have to call for the public forces."

"I showed Constance!  She's known for ages!  It didn't change anything!"

"Signorina, I'm warning you-"

"Enough!  This isn't your concern!" Nannerl snapped, leveling a finger at Salieri.  "You can leave this room right now, or you can hold your silence and let me speak with my brother!"

Salieri's dark eyes shot from Nannerl to Wolfgang, then to the door.  He cleared his throat again.  "I don't- I'm not-"

"Let me talk to her, Antonio," Wolfgang said, clambering off the bed.  "It's just my sister.  We can trust her."

With another awkward tug at his lapels, Salieri stalked out of the room, veering just enough to avoid Wolfgang's hand when he reached out to him.

But Nannerl was beyond caring whether Wolfgang's lover stayed in the room or not.  With every breath she took, another wave of this hot anger coursed through her veins.  Wolfgang had always been spoiled, she was used to that.  He was the baby, the genius, the son, the future of their family name.  What did it matter to Wolfgang who was standing brokenhearted in his shadow?

"Nannerl," Wolfgang said, crossing the room and gathering her hands in his.  "Constance knows.  I took her to the club with me every night.  She saw me with Antonio and she understood!"

Nannerl snatched her hands away, tamping down the urge to strike him.  "If you thought she knew about this, then why did you lie to her?  Why did you tell her you were in Salzburg?"

He opened his mouth to answer but stopped, evidently at a loss.  "I- I'm not sure," Wolfgang admitted.

"You know better, Wolfgang!  You've always known better!"

"Antonio wanted it to be a secret, too.  If anyone finds out, we might be arrested.  And then there's our music-"

Nannerl snatched up one of the sheets of music that had fallen to the floor.  The writing was Wolfgang's; only the title was in an unfamiliar script.  She brandished it under Wolfgang's nose.  "You're writing his opera for him?"

"We're working together," said Wolfgang.  "It's our opera.  Together."

"For the emperor's festival?"

Wolfgang nodded, that foolish grin breaking out across his face again.  For a moment, Nannerl's heart ached at the sight of it.  Her poor stupid brother, who had always had everything handed to him, who always believed that the rest of the world had his best interest at heart.  But there had to be a point where his trusting nature crossed the line into gullibility.  

"Then why hasn't a joint opera been announced, Wolfgang?  Le Relazioni Pericolose was entered into the festival as Salieri's opera, not yours."

The smile faltered, but only for an instant.  "It's a surprise," he assured her, his eyes shining.  "The emperor will think that he can give the Kapellmeister position to Antonio once he hears this opera, and then we'll reveal that we worked on it together!"

"And then what did he tell you will happen?  You'll share the Kapellmeister position too?  Or will he just keep you locked in his bedroom and consult with you at night when no one else can see?"

"Nannerl-"

"Don't trust him, Wolfgang.  Please," Nannerl said, dropping her voice to a whisper and shooting a glance over her shoulder.  She was sure Salieri was lurking just outside the door.  "Come home to your wife, to your family.  We're writing an opera too, and we'll gladly credit you if you help us!  For once in your life, please see reason!"

But Wolfgang was already shaking his head.  "You don't know him," he insisted. "You don't know the truth of him.  We have a plan."

"For heaven's sake, Wolfgang-"

"You should go," her brother interrupted.  "You'll see at the festival.  You'll see our real plan, just as I told you."  He took the sheet of music back from her, spreading it neatly across the bedside table.

Nannerl's stomach sank; a chill passed over her despite the fire crackling merrily on the hearth.  "And what would you have me tell Constance?"

A creak of the floorboards announced that Salieri had returned, though Nannerl couldn't bear to look at the man who was ruining her brother's career and destroying his family.  Wolfgang lifted his head, still smoothing the page Nannerl had crumpled as he stared at him over her shoulder.  "Tell her that she'll always be dear to me, and that I care for her very much," Wolfgang said, "but if she wants me to be happy, she must let me stay here.  With him."

Nannerl seized the inkwell off the side table and flung it against the wall, where it exploded with a satisfying crash that made Wolfgang yelp in surprise.  "When this man betrays you, don't come slinking back to us expecting sympathy," she hissed, and she stormed past a white-faced Salieri and out of the house.


	12. Les adieux d'un sex-symbol

On the last day of the emperor's opera festival, Salieri awoke to the scratch of Mozart's jaw as he kissed a spot between his shoulderblades.  

He gritted his teeth and opened one eye only to see the dingy violet bed dressings and cluttered floors of the back room.  Why had he slept in here?  This was the last day, the morning of the premier of Le Relazioni Pericolose.  He had survived almost a month of Mozart boarding in his home with his dignity intact--mostly.  There had been the incident last week when his vulgar sister had broken into Salieri's house at dawn and shrieked at him, and those few occasions when Mozart had composed something so divine that Salieri had stared at him a little too long, a little too warmly, and Mozart had noticed.  But overall, he had played his hand just as he had intended: Mozart was dedicated to their opera, and as far as the rest of society and his family were concerned, he was disgraced.  Most of Vienna had heard the news that he had been in Salzburg for the past month and had been unable to contribute an opera to the week-long festival.  Tonight, the emperor would attend the premier of Le Relazioni Pericolose, the final opera of the festival, and he would doubtlessly name Salieri Kapellmeister.

There was only one piece left to put into its place: somehow, Salieri had to remove Wolfgang Mozart from the equation.

Mozart kissed him again, his lips on Salieri's bare shoulder this time, and languidly wound his arm around his waist.  He whispered, "Good morning, maestro," before kissing the spot below his ear, and suddenly the events of the night before began to reassemble themselves in Salieri's mind.

His stomach sank.

In the week since Mozart's sister had flown into Salieri's house, shattered his favorite inkwell, and made a spectacle of herself, Mozart had gone from being a little too comfortable in Salieri's presence to absolutely insufferable.  It had begun that night, when Salieri had returned from rehearsal to find that Mozart had taken it upon himself to remove a bottle of wine from the kitchen and was halfway finished with it.   He had torn all the blankets from the bed and wrapped himself in them, slumped in the chair before the fireplace.  When Salieri had seen the state of the room he had assumed that he had been burgled or Mozart's vengeful sister had returned to finish the job she had started that morning; instead, Mozart had looked up from beneath a pile of blankets, fixed him with a bleary smile, and told him that Salieri was the only family he had left.

It was a chilling thought, and not much of an exaggeration.  Salieri had already dismissed all of his staff except for his cook and her young daughter who worked as a housemaid.  The girl was under strict orders not to enter the back room or to speak to Herr Salieri's guest, limiting her chores to the main part of the house and to Salieri's private rooms.  Maybe a part of him had wanted the isolation to drive Mozart mad.  Maybe he had wanted this opera to be the last thing his mind produced before it failed.  

Instead, the result had been that Mozart never left Salieri alone.  Since they had begun writing Le Relazioni Pericolose, Salieri could only find peace during his long walks to and from the Burgtheater each day, forgoing his carriage for a crowded street and a hat pulled low over his brow.

There were benefits to having Mozart at his disposal, of course, that weren't musical in nature.  Despite having been robbed of his privacy, Salieri found that he was better rested and more focused than he had ever been before.  He had initially told himself that the change was Mozart's absence from the palace, but it was hard not to face the truth, especially when the same thing had happened to Rosenberg a few years ago after he was married.  With Mozart in his house, Salieri was free from the pent-up frustration that had hounded him for all these years.  The lust--the jealousy that had clouded his vision had finally begun to clear.

The last night before the premier had started out normally enough: Salieri's hand pressing into the back of Mozart's neck, the harsh slap of skin on skin, Mozart's dramatic grunts muffled by the pillow.  Salieri finished with a long, deep shudder and released him, pulling out and sitting on the side of the bed while he caught his breath.  Most nights that would have been the end of it, but Mozart had been drinking more than Salieri realized.  He suddenly crawled into Salieri's lap and began trailing kisses along his throat and over his jaw.  "Antonio," Mozart had breathed, rolling his hips against Salieri's.  "Just once, just tonight, please- please kiss me."

"Mozart, I've told you-"

"I need this. I need you. My name, my music- they're taking it, they're taking everything, even my family. I'm disappearing.  Outside these doors, out in the street, I'm no one. You're the only one who sees me. Please."

"You're drunk."

"Please," Mozart whispered.  He pressed their foreheads together, the sides of their noses touching, his hot breath filling the space between their mouths with the smell of red wine.  "Antonio... Maestro..."

And with the thought that Mozart was probably too drunk to remember any of this, Salieri had given in.  He had raked his fingers through his hair and crushed Mozart's mouth to his, earning a long, low moan of relief.

All those nights at the underground ball when he had insisted on wearing his mask, all these weeks under his roof when he had struggled to maintain his distance, and this was the last boundary he hadn't let Mozart cross. A kiss was a gesture of passion, of affection, it was exchanged between lovers. It wasn't for them.  It wasn't for Salieri.  And yet the taste of Mozart's mouth, the pressure of his tongue, the contented hum as he sucked on Salieri's lower lip... he found himself cupping Mozart's backside in both hands and pulling him tighter against him until Mozart pushed him over, wrapping his arms around Salieri's neck and wantonly rocking his pelvis against him.  It wasn't until Mozart pulled back to catch his breath that Salieri saw that his cheeks were slick with tears, his eyes a watery red.  "I knew," Mozart had sighed, pressing his forehead to Salieri's again and cupping his head in his hands.  "I knew this was real."  And then he had buried his face into the crook of Salieri's neck and fallen asleep like that, his limbs tangled around him, his erection twitching and gradually going soft.  Salieri had lain there for a long time, staring dully at the underside of the canopy, one hand still buried in Mozart's hair and the other tucked around his thigh.  He told himself that if he moved and woke Mozart, he risked starting the whole spectacle over again.  That time, just that once, he had had no choice but to let himself sleep in Mozart's arms.  After all, in the morning it would all be over.

But morning had come, and Mozart was kissing his neck and calling him maestro again.

Salieri lay still for a moment longer as he tried to collect his thoughts.  Mozart might have been disgraced, but it wasn't enough.  If he appeared at the opera tonight, eager to reveal himself as Salieri's coauthor and therefore as equally worthy of the Kapellmeister position, there was still a chance that the emperor would side with him.  The emperor liked Salieri and had questionable taste in music, true, but above all he was a flighty, tempestuous man who prided himself on being open-minded enough to break old traditions.  If anyone was going to attempt to name two people to his Kapellmeister position, or, worse, do away with the position altogether, it was Emperor Joseph II.  And even if the emperor didn't believe Mozart's claims, there was too much risk that the Viennese would take up the story themselves.  They had already demonstrated with Mozart the power a popular rumor could have on a man's career.  No, Salieri couldn't allow Mozart to attend the festival.

So what was he to do?  A month ago, he had considered killing him.  A few drops of some back-alley poison in his cocoa, perhaps, and Salieri could pretend to dote on the man until his heart stopped, sparing him the embarrassment of a confrontation.  Or he could hold his neck a bit too tightly while he screwed him and let him fade away in the act.  But what would the Viennese say when Wolfgang Mozart's corpse was carried out of Kapellmeister Salieri's house on the day his finest opera was debuted for the emperor? 

"I know you aren't sleeping, Antonio," Mozart whispered, his breath tickling Salieri's ear.  He tugged at his shoulder.  "Come here, hold me!"

Salieri threw himself out of the bed, locating his nightshirt on the messy floor and pulling it on as quickly as he could.  On second thought, he collected his housecoat from the chair by the fireplace and shrugged it on as well, smoothing the lapels and tugging the cuffs into place.  Mozart stared at him from the bed with those uncomprehending brown eyes, naked beneath the thin blanket he was now clutching to his chest.  Salieri had to drop his own gaze to the floor: he suddenly felt like a farmhand who had been tasked with drowning the runt of a litter.

He cleared his throat and turned his back to the bed, unsure where to begin.

"Antonio?  What's wrong?"

"I've asked you not to call me that," Salieri said.  His voice sounded too small in his own ears.  He tugged at his cuffs again, rolling his shoulders back and lifting his head.  This was what he wanted.  This was what he had been waiting for.  It was supposed to be easy.  A relief.

"Are you upset about last night?"

Salieri spotted the ribbon he had worn yesterday and snatched it up, quickly smoothing down his hair and tying it back.  He swallowed against the lump that was building in his throat.

"Ant- I mean- look, you can trust me.  I know you.  I won't betray you.  It's alright to be yourself with me, to let go.  You know that, right?"

"Signor Mozart," he blurted, spinning on his heel, "I think you've taken advantage of my hospitality long enough, don't you?"

He blinked, but the light in his eyes still hadn't faded.  "What do you mean?"

Salieri noticed a stray sheet of music on the floor by the end table and lifted it delicately between two fingers.  It was the final revision they had been working on yesterday morning, a new verse for the marquise's final aria.  Tiny notes were splattered across the clefs like a constellation.  Mozart's handwriting.  He sniffed, crumpled the page in his fists, and tossed it into the fireplace.

"Antonio!  What are you doing?" Mozart cried, leaping out of the bed as though he intended to dive into the fire after it.  "Our work...!"

"You should have listened to that harpy sister of yours," said Salieri.  "She tried to tell you that Le Relazione Pericolose has already been credited to me."

Mozart swayed where he stood, absentmindedly reaching for Salieri's arm to steady himself.  "What are you talking about?  That's the plan!  When I come with you to the opera tonight-"

Salieri pulled his arm away and stepped back.

"Antonio?  Your plan, our plan- the opera...!"

"This was always my plan," Salieri said firmly.  He turned away from Mozart's frenzied gaze and wrenched open the door, adding, "It's only unfortunate that you were too stupid to see it.  I expect you to be gone from my house by the time I return this evening."  And, unable to think of anything else to say, he slipped out into the hall and closed the door, slumping against it and then letting himself sink down onto the floor.  

He wasn't sure how long he sat there, breathing shallowly and straining his ears against the creaky old house for any sound that his plan had succeeded.  He had heard the initial thud of Mozart falling to his knees and the occasional sharp, ragged inhale, but nothing further.  No footsteps, no raised voice, no shattering inkwells.  Even out here in the hallway he could feel the weight of Mozart's eyes on him.  He could still feel the weight of Mozart's head on his chest, of his arms wound around him, the rhythm of his quiet snores.  The heat of his touch, the tickle of his kisses... it enveloped him, clogging his lungs and his vision like a fog.  He was rid of it.  He was rid of Mozart at last.  This was what he wanted, what he had always wanted since the first day he had heard that aria from Die Entführung aus dem Serail.  He just hadn't expected his victory to weigh on his heart like a clenched fist.

It was a knock at the front door that eventually reminded him that time outside the house hadn't stopped.  He heard the thin voice of the little maid as she answered and he heaved himself to his feet, striding purposefully to his own rooms where he quickly changed out of his housecoat and smoothed his hair again, buckling his breeches over his stockings just as the girl knocked lightly at his door and announced his guest in a near whisper.

Aloysia Lange stood in the center of his parlor, sneering at the dusty divan that was meant for waiting guests.  She cast a pointed stare around the rarely-used room before offering her hand to Salieri.  "Maestro." 

He caught her fingertips in his and brushed his lips over her knuckles, muttering, "Signora."  A floorboard creaked overheard--was it coming from the back room?  He resisted the urge to rush right back out into the hallway to verify.  No, if Mozart was leaving his house now it would be best if he thought that Salieri wasn't paying attention to him.  He had to know that he was nothing to him.

Signora Lange cleared her throat, and Salieri realized that he was still holding her hand.  He dropped it and took a quick step back.  "May I assume you haven't come to request the lead role in my opera?  We premier tonight, you know.  You've left it a little late this time."

She rolled her eyes and fixed him with her unsettling stare.  "May I assume that the child who let me in is some sort of maid and not your illegitimate daughter?  Or your wife?"

"Assume what you like," he answered thinly.  This was exactly why he preferred working with Signorina Cavalieri.

"I've come with a proposition," Signora Lange announced.  "I have information I could offer in exchange for the lead role in your first opera written as Kapellmeister."

Ah, so he hadn't been far off.  "What sort of information?"

"A plot," said Signora Lange, "to undermine Le Relazioni Pericolose."

Salieri crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe.  This wasn't Signora Lange's first attempt to bribe her way into one of his operas, but this time... this time, if her information was good and if someone really was going to sabotage his opera, he would have destroyed Wolfgang Mozart for nothing.  He closed his eyes for a moment, straining his ears for any noise from the back room.  Nothing.  What if Mozart had convinced himself that Salieri would change his mind?  What if he was sitting up there waiting for him to come back?

What if he was tying the bedsheets into a noose?

"Herr Salieri?" Signora Lange asked, her sharp voice cutting into his thoughts.

"Apologies," he mumbled.  He shook his head and stepping away from the door.  Mozart meant nothing to him.  "It's my- uh, my opera.  I keep thinking of revisions."

"Do you want my information or not?"

"Please," Salieri said.  He gestured to the divan, but Signora Lange shot it a withering look and stayed where she was.  "Of course you can sing in my next opera, Signora.  I'd have asked no one else."

"Hm.  I've come to tell you that Nannerl Mozart has written an opera and mounted it herself.  It debuts tonight at the same time as Le Relazioni Pericolose."

Salieri barely stopped himself from rolling his eyes.  Mozart's sister?  That shrill, crass little creature thought she could create music?  "And who would produce an opera written by a woman?"

"There's an abandoned manor a few streets away from the Burgtheater," Signora Lange told him.  "They're mounting the show in its private theater and opening the doors to anyone who wishes to attend at no charge.  The word has been out for a week thanks to a popular club that meets nightly in the ballroom below."

"I'm familiar," Salieri said, glancing toward the hall again.  He had heard a step on the stair, but it was only the little housemaid.

"I thought you might be."

"Well?  What do they hope to accomplish with this scene of theirs, then?  Do they think my audience would accidentally attend their spectacle?  Will they burn down the Burgtheater and herd everyone who escapes to their dusty old mansion?"

Signora Lange shrugged.  "If you see empty seats at the Burgtheater tonight, at least you'll know where everyone has gone."

"Is there anything else?" he asked, not bothering to hide his impatience.  "Maybe some information that would actually be worth the lead role in my next opera?"

She pretended to think for a moment, tapping one long finger against her chin.  "Oh!  Well, you may not think much of Fraulein Mozart, but perhaps it would interest you to know that the lead role is being sung by La Cavalieri."

"La Cavalieri?" he repeated.  "But her landlady said she was visiting family in- in Salzburg."

"What family does La Cavalieri have in Salzburg?" Signora Lange scoffed.  "She's the daughter of a Viennese workingman.  It was Fraulein Mozart's idea to say she was out of town just to get away from you."

"Alright, Signora, if you're finished-"

"Oh, did I forget to tell you the name of the opera?  I think you know their librettist."

"Signora-"

"They're working with Gottlieb Stephanie," she said.  "The opera is called Gefährliche Liebschaften.  Perhaps you're familiar with the story?"

Salieri leaned back against the wall, narrowing his eyes as he studied her cold expression.  Was everyone conspiring against him now?  Next she was going to tell him that Da Ponte was directing this ridiculous farce, and that Rosenberg had made the costumes.  He could just imagine Mozart's crude sister and Signorina Cavalieri whispering about him behind their fans.  How had they come to work with Stephanie?  How had they managed to get the one libretto that was taken from the same source as Salieri's own opera?  And they were mounting it at the club!  At his club, the one place in this wretched city where he had ever felt at ease.

"If you'll excuse me," Signora Lange said, brushing past him and into the foyer.  "I'm afraid I failed to mention that I'm playing the marquise in Fraulein Mozart's opera.  Perhaps I'll see you there?"

Salieri clenched his fists but didn't answer.  They weren't going to take his opera from him.  He had sacrificed everything for this.

"In any case, I'll see you at rehearsals for your next opera, Herr Kapellmeister." She swept to the door and threw one of her lazy smiles over her shoulder.  "Oh, and tell Wolfgang that his effects are packed in a trunk in the cellar of the Gods Eye.  He can send someone to collect them, or we can just have them delivered here for him.  We certainly want to make sure he feels at home.  Good day, Maestro." And with that, she was gone.

Wolfgang!  

Salieri darted into the foyer, nearly bowling over the little housemaid as he took the stairs two at a time and barreled down the hall.  He threw open the door to the back room, unsure whether he was going to throw Mozart out into the street at once or beg him to stay.  All this time, Salieri had been focusing on writing a great opera to make his name immortal and to secure the court position that was rightfully his.  All this time, his allies had been conspiring with his enemies to undermine him.  La Cavalieri had lied to him and mocked him, Da Ponte had stolen the idea for his libretto, and the underground ball itself supported this homespun farce written by a woman over an opera written by the next imperial Kapellmeister. Wolfgang Mozart was the only loyal person he knew.

But the back room was empty.  The bed was made, the fire was extinguished, and every trace of Mozart was gone.


	13. Petite musique terrienne

Nannerl gripped the wing of a crumbling gargoyle and leaned out further over the edge of the roof.  The doors of the private theater were still closed, but she had been able to hear the hubbub of the crowd that was waiting in the entry hall even above the excited conversation of her troupe as they prepared behind the curtain.  And the crowd wasn't confined to the building: from her precarious perch on the roof, Nannerl could see dozens, maybe even hundreds of people filling the street below.  It was hard to decide if the feeling in the pit of her stomach was exhilaration or terror.  She looked out over the rest of Vienna, at the stone buildings that were just picking up a rosy hue from the sunset, at the lights that were beginning to burn in some of the windows, and, not too far away, at the roof of the Burgtheater, its white statues thrown into the shadow of the palace that loomed beside it.  Since they had moved their rehearsals to the old mansion, the many members of the club that met in the underground ballroom had adopted their "deviants' opera" as if it were their own project.  After all, the libretto had been donated by Gottlieb Stephanie, who counted himself as one of their members, and another little group from the club had volunteered to bring instruments from home to complete their makeshift orchestra.  In a way, Gefährliche Liebschaften belonged to all of them just as surely as Salieri's stolen opera Le Relazioni Pericolose belonged to no one.

She cast another look at the Burgtheater before turning her back on it and facing the sunset.  The roof of the old mansion was mostly flat but for an ornate gable that hid the access door, providing a vast, empty space all to herself.  If ever she had needed a moment away from her opera, this was it, but there was no more time.  She took a final breath and looked around the city again before she had to close the door on the sunset.  Vienna, the city of musicians.  The city whose citizens had embraced her, had embraced her music.  The city whose streets were now lined with people from all social classes, each one of them waiting to hear Nannerl's music.  She shivered and hurried back inside.  What would her father think if he could have seen this?

The gable hid a dusty staircase which spiraled down into the wings of the private theater.  As she descended, the tranquility of the roof faded into the bustling panic that had been going on backstage for hours: Charlotte and Zahera were attempting to make final revisions to costumes even while the dancers rehearsed in them; the flutist had decided to wear the mask he usually wore to the underground ball and was in a corner with a hammer and chisel, attempting to knock some sort of mouth hole into the wood without cracking it; and above the sound of various instruments warming up, she could hear Caterina's soaring voice coming from the odd little closet they had been using as a dressing room.  Nannerl shot a smile at the closed door as she passed it.  It was hard to tell what the room's purpose had been back when this house was inhabited, but it would have made an excellent dressing room if only the locks weren't all on the outside of the door.  With no way to assure one's privacy from the inside, anyone who had tried to use the room during their rehearsals had inevitably been interrupted, often half-dressed, to the point where the ridiculous room had become a laughingstock among the troupe.  It was Clara who had finally devised a system wherein the person using the room would tuck one stocking into the latch to signify that it was occupied.  It was a rudimentary solution, but had proven efficient and necessary once the women had been joined by male musicians from the underground ball.

Nannerl found Constance and Clara out in the house, lighting the last few candles in the enormous chandelier.  Constance was wearing one of Wolfgang's old jackets and a tricorn hat, though her hair was hanging loose around her shoulders in its long curls.  Nannerl paused at the foot of the stage and watched her turn her sweet smile on Clara as she passed her a candle, the chandelier lighting her face with a warm, golden glow.  It had been a week since Constance had decided that Wolfgang wasn't welcome at the Gods Eye anymore, since Nannerl had helped her go through his things and pack everything Constance didn't want in a trunk, since the two of them had carried it down to the basement and left it in the shadowy corner by the stairs.  She still remembered the grim, sallow look on her sister-in-law's face that day, a look she had worn for weeks.  There was no sign of it now.

Clara grinned when she noticed Nannerl watching them.  "So?  Has our other lead put in an appearance yet?" she asked, returning the candle Constance had passed her to its place and stepping away from the chandelier. 

Nannerl shook her head.  She climbed down from the stage and joined them at the bracket on the back wall, pretending not to notice the way Constance's fingers lingered over Clara's before the three of them gripped the chain together and began hoisting the lit chandelier up to its spot in the center of the room.  "You brought a dress, didn't you, Constance?" Nannerl asked.  "If Aloysia doesn't come, perhaps you could play the marquise in her stead.  You did beautifully during rehearsals today."

Clara hummed in agreement, but Constance's eyes widened at the suggestion.  "I- I'm not sure if I could."

"I'd sing it myself, but I don't think my little orchestra would be able to make it through the show without me on the clavichord.  They're practically improvising as it is."  She and Constance held the chain steady while Clara secured it to the bracket.  At Clara's sign, all three of them stepped away, craning their necks to admire the chandelier that was now swinging gently above the empty theater.

"There's no need to be shy about it," Clara pointed out, letting one of her hands rest on Constance's shoulder.  Constance's cheeks were starting to turn pink.  "This isn't the imperial theater, and it isn't that difficult a part.  It'll be Fraulein Caterina doing most of the work."

"So now you admit that the marquise is a smaller role?" asked a sharp voice from behind them.

Constance flinched, but Nannerl felt her heart soar.  She spun around to face Aloysia, who had slipped in from one of the side entrances and was smirking at the three of them.  "Thank goodness!" she cried, and she threw her arms around Aloysia's waist, her ear pressing against her breast for the long moment it took her to come to her senses and release her.  Perhaps she was overreacting, but she was too relieved to be angry.  The house was scheduled to open in a matter of minutes, and one of their main leads had been missing all day.

Something was amiss, however: if she didn't know better, Nannerl would have thought the sudden flush that rose to Aloysia's cheeks and the way she cleared her throat and smoothed her skirt were signs that she had been caught off-guard.  "No need to make a scene," she grumbled.

"There isn't time to warm you up now," tutted Clara with a glance at her pocketwatch.  Like Constance, she was dressed in a borrowed suit, though hers had clearly been made for a much smaller man and came up short at the wrists and knees. Wolfgang's outfit was only tight across Constance's bust.  There was something uncanny and deeply charming about the picture the four of them made: Clara and Constance stealing glances at each other in clothes they'd borrowed from their husbands, while Aloysia towered over them in her elegant riding cloak and Nannerl herself was in her favorite formal dress, a frothy blue frock covered in appliqué butterflies.

Out in the entrance hall, the waiting crowd had begun clapping in a slow, impatient rhythm to signal that they were ready for the doors to open.  Nannerl seized Aloysia's hand.  "Come on, we'll throw Caterina out of the dressing room so you can get ready.  She's been in there long enough."

"Typical," Aloysia muttered.  Then, to Nannerl's surprise, Aloysia laced their fingers together and let herself be led backstage without making any further remarks.

On the other side of the curtain they were met with a chorus of relieved sighs and a few cheers, even from the men who had joined the orchestra.  Nannerl stopped long enough to bow, which she noticed startled a tiny smile out of Aloysia.  That settled it, she thought as she knocked on the door of the dressing room.  Something strange was definitely going on with her.  "Are you alright?" she asked, keeping her voice low.

Aloysia stared at Nannerl, appraising.  Something flickered behind her hard gaze and her grip on Nannerl's hand tightened for an instant. "There's- there's something I should tell you," she admitted at last.

But that was the moment when Caterina opened the dressing room door.  Her costume was perfect: she was dressed in a suit that had been tailored a little too well, with breeches that called attention the curve of her hips and her plump thighs.  Nannerl released Aloysia's hand and seized her by her shoulders.  "My Caterina!" she gasped, "Look at you!"

"Monsieur le victome de Valmont, pour vous servir!" she answered, scooping up one of Nannerl's hands and kissing it.  Then she noticed Aloysia and cautiously added, "So you decided to come after all, did you?"

"So you decided to stop gazing at your own reflection in the mirror and let someone else use the dressing room, did you?" Aloysia shot back.

Caterina just smiled and stepped aside, collecting her stocking from the latch and leaning against the wall as she slid it on.  "Don't take too long in there," she said. "Someone might lock you in out of spite."

Aloysia's icy stare slid from Caterina to Nannerl before she slammed the dressing room door.

"You shouldn't let her bait you," Nannerl murmured, looking down at the hand that Aloysia had just released.  Her palm had been clammy.  That too was unlike her.

Caterina shrugged. "You don't know her like I do."

She thought of the look that had crossed Aloysia's eyes, of that glimpse of a crack in her carefully-constructed armor.  "I don't know about that," Nannerl said wryly.  In a way, Aloysia was just as responsible for the birth of Gefährliche Liebschaften as Caterina or Nannerl.  After all, it was through Aloysia that she had met the women of the abandoned church.  It was through Aloysia that she and Caterina had found each other.  She thought back to the last time she had passed through the catacombs before she met Caterina, to the smug warmth in Aloysia's eyes as she had pinned her to a pew at the back of the chapel and gathered her skirts into her lap, sliding one hand between her thighs and watching Nannerl writhe beneath her teasing touch.  There had always been heat between them, but it was Aloysia who had kept Nannerl at an arm's length.  It was Aloysia who had treated her like a plaything, pulling away whenever Nannerl tried to reach for her.  It was Aloysia's fault that they hadn't quite been lovers.  So why did Nannerl suddenly feel like she had done something wrong?

Caterina wound her arms around Nannerl's neck and pressed a kiss to her jaw.  "You've nothing to fear, Maestra," she purred.  "Your opera will astound them!"

"The house is open!" Clara called, batting the old curtain out of the way as she joined them backstage.  Constance was trailing just behind her, as usual.  "Fraulein, you should see them!  And my husband came!"

"Your husband?" Constance repeated quickly.  "So?"

"So, my little Conrad!" she crowed, kissing Constance's rosy cheek, "so he brought his entourage with him!  They were all supposed to be at that bastard Salieri's opera, and they chose to come here instead!  Old Salieri must be fuming!"

Caterina grinned, releasing Nannerl only to catch her face in her hands.  "You see?  It's just as I told you.  All of Vienna will know your talent.  And then-"

"All the world," Nannerl whispered.  On the other side of the curtain, she could hear the rumble of voices as the crowd she had seen from the roof began pouring into the old theater.

Clara consulted her pocketwatch again.  "Almost time."

Caterina pulled her down into a lingering kiss, winding her arms around her neck.  She only pulled away to press their foreheads together and murmur, "They'll love you.  We all do."

Nannerl closed her eyes.  She had passed the day focusing on one problem at a time: convincing Constance to stand in for Aloysia during rehearsals, for instance, and then trying to coerce her into going on for the real show.  That morning they had spent hours prying boards away from the grand entrance, dusting cobwebs, and replacing any candles in the chandelier or along the walls that looked too low to burn through their entire opera.  But now there were only minutes between Caterina's warm embrace and facing the audience on the other side of the curtain.  In a matter of minutes, she would finally be conducting her own opera in Vienna.

Aloysia emerged from the dressing room in her glimmering marquise costume, one of her own dresses which she hadn't allowed Charlotte or Zahera to alter.  Her hair was swept away from her long neck and a sliver bauble hung over her throat.  Her dark gaze--darker now that she had on her stage makeup--rested on Nannerl for an instant, then flicked over to Caterina and she turned away.

Nannerl kissed Caterina's brow and reluctantly broke out of her embrace. "I suppose my orchestra needs me."

"The next time we kiss, you'll be famous," Caterina called as Clara led Nannerl away.

She pushed her way past the curtain, her heartbeat thick in her throat.  Clara whispered some last word of encouragement from the shadowy wings, but Nannerl could barely hear it. The roar of the crowd ebbed for a moment and she could feel hundreds of pairs of eyes on her as she clambered over the lip of the stage.  Though she was trying to keep her head down and her gaze straight ahead, she caught a glimpse of her waiting audience: a good portion of them were in masks, just like the men from the underground ball.  Those that were bare-faced were staring at her expectantly, packed shoulder-to-shoulder along the theater.  She barely had room to make her way over to her spot at the clavichord.  Once she took her seat and nodded to her makeshift orchestra, Nannerl was surprised to hear a single voice let out a whoop somewhere in the room.  It was the fissure that broke the dam: suddenly the entire audience had burst into a tumultuous applause peppered with whistles and even a few howls.  Nannerl glanced over her shoulder, unable to hold back a grin.  Gefährliche Liebschaften belonged to all of them.

The energy of the crowd didn't die down when the curtain opened.  In fact, each new character to appear onstage was met with a fresh ovation, forcing Nannerl and her orchestra to improvise extended introductions to every aria and recitative.  Her troupe fed off the energy in the room as well.  Caterina had never been more bewitching.  There was even a glint in Aloysia's eye that Nannerl had never seen during their rehearsals.

As Clara and Constance gently lowered the curtain on the first act, Nannerl felt the crowd pressing in around her and the orchestra was drowned out by voices shouting her name.  Revelers shook her hand until her arm was numb; at one point the face of their librettist appeared from behind a mask and he went so far as to fling his arms around her.  Better-connected guests were leaning over the edges of the boxes, hands cupped around their mouths as they cheered and waved their hats and handkerchiefs.  For a few minutes, Nannerl felt like a child again, propped up by her father before a salon full of stuffy noblemen, giving a clunky recital and watching their sleepy eyes widen, watching their puckered mouths drop open.  This was the path her father had set her on when she was a girl.  This was who she had always been.  She had never expected to find her way back to it.

The crowd around her began to thin as the intermission wore on too long; the people who were still at their places had begun a rhythm of stomping and clapping in unison to signify that they were ready for more.  She could hear the quiet plucking of strings as her orchestra began to tune up for the second act and she turned back to face them, her heart truly soaring now.  The second act was her favorite.  She couldn't wait for them to hear it.

A hand closed around Nannerl's arm suddenly; she turned to find herself confronted by an extremely disheveled Wolfgang.  Despite the purple rings beneath his bloodshot eyes and the way he was clinging to her, Nannerl found herself smiling at the sight of him.  "You came!" she said, pulling him into an embrace.

But Wolfgang twisted free of her arms, clapping his hands onto Nannerl's shoulder instead and asking, "Is Antonio here?"

The bubble of joy that had surrounded her burst at the name.  "Antonio?" she repeated darkly.

"He- I went to the Burgtheater to find him but they said he left partway through the first act.  They said he wasn't himself."

"For heaven's sake, Wolfgang," Nannerl sighed.  She pulled his hands away from her shoulders and cast an uncomfortable glance at the crowd behind her.  Most of them were engaged in their own conversations, but many were watching her, waiting for her to cue in the next act.  "You're interrupting the premier of my first opera to ask about your-" she cut herself off, remembering the nearby crowd.  "Your colleague?  Your rival?  The man who ruined your career and your chance to be named Kapellmeister?"  She slid off the clavichord bench and pulled him aside; a few groans rose from the impatient audience.  "Go talk to your wife, Wolfgang," she said sternly.  "Ask her forgiveness.  If I see your precious Antonio, I'll tell him to go straight to hell, and to take his stolen opera with him."

"There's hardly anyone at the Burgtheater," Wolfgang said faintly.  He blinked, furrowing his brow as he seemed to notice his surroundings for the first time.  "Nannerl... they're all here!  The audience... the ball!"

"Go apologize to Constance!" she said again, shoving him toward the curtain.  "She's backstage.  Ask anyone for her, or for Clara.  They're always together."

"Who's Clara?"

"Short black hair, borrowed clothes--you'll see her.  Please, Wolfgang, I have an opera to conduct."

"Clara Rosenberg?"

"Wolfgang!  Go!"

He threw up both hands in a gesture of surrender and clambered onto the stage, disappearing behind the curtain.

Nannerl returned to her bench with a sigh; the audience behind her broke into their raucous cheers when she lifted one arm and counted her orchestra in.  By the time the curtains opened again and Caterina swept onto the stage, Nannerl had nearly forgotten her brother's intrusion. 


	14. Le monde est stone

They had lowered the curtain on the first act and separated themselves and the troupe from the cheering crowd, but Clara wouldn't stop peeking out at the audience.   Constance crossed her arms with a huff.  It was hard to focus on Nannerl's opera when all Clara could talk about was her stupid husband. 

Over by the dressing room, she noticed Aloysia leaning against the wall, an expression of impatience on her face that was probably identical to the one Constance herself was wearing.  She hadn't had much time to talk to her sister since she had arrived only moments before the first act began.  With a final glance at Clara--or, rather, at the back of Clara's head--Constance left her there at the edge of the curtain.   "So?" she asked, taking a spot at Aloysia's side.  "Where were you all day?"

Aloysia shot her a hard look.  "Does it matter?"

"Well, I didn't think so until you asked me that.  What have you done now?"

"Would you leave me alone?"

"Come on," Constance said, shoving her shoulder.  "It's not as though I would turn my own sister over to the public forces.  How bad could it be?"

Aloysia cast a glance around the stage and the wings, confirming that the rest of the troupe was busy organizing props and changing into costumes for the second act.  She glowered at the closed dressing room door, where one of La Cavalieri's stockings was tucked into the latch.  "I need to talk to Nannerl," she said at length, keeping her voice low, "but every time I try that little snoop interrupts us.  I- I think I made a mistake."

"I can try to pass along your message," Constance offered.

Aloysia merely scoffed.

"Oh, there you are!" Clara called as she joined them.  She seized Constance's hand and pressed a kiss to her knuckles.  "I could just make out my husband up there in my box. You should see the way they're applauding!  Of course, I can't see their faces since they're all in masks, but my husband isn't an easy man to please, which means-"

Constance jerked her hand away, then immediately regretted it when she saw the look on Clara's face.  She let out a long exhale between her teeth, her cheeks burning.  Why did every mention of Clara's husband annoy her so much?  Was she jealous that Clara had the privilege of knowing where her husband was?  That she still went home to him every night?  Or was it the specter of the husband himself that made her feel so- so helpless?  Was it the thought of him slipping into Clara's bed at night, of his lips on her ivory skin?

"What's the matter, Conrad?" she asked, dipping her head to catch Constance's eye.

Aloysia heaved a loud sigh and pushed Constance toward Clara.  "If you're going to tell her now, don't do it in front of me."

"Tell me what?" Constance asked sharply.

Clara pursed her lips and exchanged a strange look with Aloysia.  Letting her fingertips come to rest gently on Constance's arm, she gestured with her other hand toward the staircase beyond dressing room.  "Come up to the roof with me?"

Aloysia just snickered.

Zahera and Charlotte agreed to operate the curtain for the second act in case Clara and Constance weren't finished talking in time, and the two of them made their way up the narrow wooden stairs.  Constance had seen plenty of other people using this staircase during rehearsals: it opened to the roof above and to a passage leading into the ballroom below, making it a more convenient way to bring certain supplies up and down during their week of rehearsal.  She had never had need of it herself.  She knew Nannerl liked the solitude of the roof and the view it afforded of the city, but the height and the steep drop to the distant street had always seemed unnecessarily risky to Constance.

"Alright," Clara said as she closed the door to the staircase and faced Constance.  "What is it that's really bothering you?"

Constance shrugged; unable to meet Clara's eye, she looked out over the dusky city.  The sky above them was peppered with stars just as the windows of the city were dotted with candlelight.  At the center of it all, the mansion upon which they stood seemed small.  With a sigh, Constance turned back to Clara.  Her angular face almost gaunt in the moonlight.  "I don't know.  The thought of the two of you just- just annoys me.  Maybe I'm jealous."

"Jealous? You?"

She shrugged again.  "We've spent so much time together these past few weeks, and just when I start to think that with your help I'll make it through this, through- through what Wolfgang's done... I don't need a reminder that you have a whole life outside of this show, outside of... outside of spending time with me.  That when all this is over we'll just go back to whatever's left of our lives.  That I won't see you anymore."  She winced at how foolish the words sounded even as she said them.

To her surprise, Clara didn't laugh or bat her selfish concerns away.  Instead, she caught Constance's hands in hers.  "Well, you're wrong about that, my lovely Conrad," she said.  "Going back to the life I had before I knew you would be nothing short of torture.  A death sentence.  I'd trade every moment I've ever spent in my husband's company for a half-hour with you."

Constance stared at their joined hands, her heartbeat loud in her ears.  She thought back to the day she had met Clara in the box, to holding her chin in her hand and staring at her lips, to trying to imagine what Aloysia would do.  It had never occurred to Constance until then to consider mirroring her sister's long-held proclivities: after all, she had had feelings for Wolfgang since the first time his late mother had brought him to their little house in Mannheim.  After all, storybook romances always told of a Prince Charming sweeping in to take the fair damsel off to his castle to live happily ever after.  After all, she had always prided herself on being nothing like Aloysia.  But she had spent weeks now with the women of the abandoned chapel, had thumbed nervously through the deck of cards while she listened to them murmur into each other's ears, caress each other, hold each other.  For the first time, it wasn't just the sort of thing Aloysia got up to when her husband was away.

"There was something I wanted to ask you," Clara murmured.

She lifted her gaze to meet Clara's, suddenly shy.  At first, it had been her passing resemblance to Wolfgang that had caught Constance's attention, that had made her stand out among all the other women Constance knew.  But now that she knew her, now that they had spent so much time together, she was so much more.  Constance let her eyes travel from Clara's dark, smoldering gaze along the elegant lines of her neck, and suddenly she found herself staring at the top button of her blouse and wondering what would happen if she reached up and unfastened it.

Clara released one of Constance's hands.  Before she had time to miss the warmth of her touch, however, she felt Clara's fingertips at her hip, then felt her arm encircle her waist as she pulled Constance against her.  "Herr Conrad," Clara breathed, her lips brushing Constance's cheek, "what would you say if I admitted that I want to kiss you?"

Constance tightened her grip on Clara's hand as a warm shiver coursed through her.  She turned her head until Clara's shallow breaths were ghosting across her lips, letting her eyes close. "Do it," she whispered.  "Kiss me."

 

* * *

 

Salieri had felt the world spinning off its axis all day.  Something wasn't right.  Nothing was right.  The faces of the troupe of Le Relazioni Pericolose were grotesque, with exaggerated grins and glassy eyes, and the music... the music was all wrong.  It was as if damp rags had been shoved inside all the instruments.  As if he was going deaf.  As if everyone was going deaf but him.

He had soldiered on as he always did, grim and resolute, the picture of gravity, the model of reserve, but partway through the first act he had looked over his shoulder at the half-empty house and seen that there was no one in the emperor's box.  There was hardly anyone in the theater at all, only over-powdered half-dead aristocrats who couldn't even hear the music through their ear trumpets, gray and listing in their private boxes.  Only the sort of people who wouldn't have heard of the deviants' opera at the underground ball.

The sight of the emperor's empty chair felt like a hand closing over his windpipe.  He had staggered in his conducting, the baton slipping from his fingers.  The world shifted again; he seized the music stand for support.  Someone touched his shoulder, a concerned voice whispered in his ear, but he didn't understand the coarse German syllables anymore.  One by one the musicians had fastened their eyes to him, until Salieri had shoved the assistant conductor away and swept right out of the Burgtheater.

A chilly breeze ripped along the narrow street.  Salieri's lips had never felt so dry.  He shivered, only realizing when the air hit his brow that he was drenched in sweat.  He turned in the direction of his house, but the image of the empty bed in the back room appeared before him.  He hesitated, ignoring the stares of passersby, then pivoted on his heel and set off in the direction of his club.

A vendor outside the mansion was selling papier-mâché masks painted in absurd colors.  Salieri shoved a handful of coins at the man and snatched up a black domino, tying the ribbon around his head as he entered the old mansion through its enormous double doors.  The entryway was full of people, their voices a cacophony of enthusiastic nonsense, a few of them calling out in protest as Salieri pushed his way through the crowd and into the packed theater.

This was how he came to witness part of the first act of Mozart's sister's opera.  If the other spectators hadn't been pressed around him so tightly, he would have sagged to his knees at the first note.  It was music like he had never heard before, music that coursed in his blood and seeped into his bones, music so rich that it filled his thoughts with a deep, unshakable horror.  He stared at Mozart's sister, the vulgar little woman who had stormed into his house last week, watching her long, bare arms as she led a makeshift orchestra of traitors, as she summoned this unearthly music out of them.  The opera Salieri and Mozart had written together was worthless compared to this.  Mozart's talent, Mozart's divine gift... it had moved on to his sister, of all people.  The shame settled in the pit of Salieri's stomach like a knot, like a flame.  When he had tried to possess Mozart's talent, tried to steal it for himself, it had left its vessel altogether rather than let Salieri touch any of its glory.  Gefährliche Liebschaften was a sublime masterpiece, a glimpse at eternity.  Le Relazioni Pericolose would be forgotten by the morning.  He had destroyed Wolfgang for nothing.

He kept his position at the back of the house, as filled with the desire to flee the city as with the need to stay and witness the birth of the deviants' opera.  Only the music, this divine music, permeated the senseless symphony of his thoughts.  By the time the first act had ended, Salieri intended to end this night by throwing himself into the river and relieving Vienna of his mediocre existence, of his stolen talent.

But as the intermission ended, as the little Mozart sister raised those elegant arms of hers again, he saw Wolfgang Mozart emerge from the crowd.  Salieri's blood ran hot at the sight of him.  So here he was after all!  Less than a day since he had left Salieri's house, since he had lost Le Relazioni Pericolose, and already he had come running back to his sister, back to his wife.  When the sister pulled him into an embrace and then stepped aside to whisper conspiratorially with him before the whole crowd, Salieri felt the first hiss of fear curl through his body.  If Wolfgang was working with his sister, if he had earned back the trust of his family, that meant that he was free to spread the rumors of what had happened with Le Relazioni Pericolose.  He could destroy everything Salieri had worked for with a well-placed word.

The sister gestured toward the stage and Wolfgang climbed up onto it, pushing aside the curtain and joining the troupe of the deviants' opera as they prepared for act two.  The sister returned to her place at the harpsichord and the second act began to the deafening shrieks and whoops of the assembled crowd.  Salieri curled his hands into fists, raking his eyes over the harpsichord, over the bench.  Yes, it was the one that had been sitting downstairs in the ballroom all those nights.  The very bench upon which they had sat that while they had played a sonatina together, their legs touching, Wolfgang's eyes flashing from behind his mask.  When Wolfgang had taken his hand and run his fingers across his wrist, had looked up at him through his lashes and complemented his playing.  How much had changed since that night, the last night before the world had been knocked off-course!

Salieri turned his back on the opera, forcing his way back out into the entryway, through another doorway and down the stairs to the underground ballroom.  It was empty and dark, the ball abandoned in favor of the opera that was raging upstairs.  He cast a stare toward the corner where the harpsichord had stood, the place where he and Wolfgang had first touched, and he felt a wave of nausea engulf him.  All he had wanted was an opera, one single shining work that would carry his name into the future!  All he had wanted was a fragment of Mozart's talent!  A month of his life!  But the talent had moved on, and the man it had left behind had become a weapon.

He had to be stopped.

Salieri strode across the empty ballroom, his heels clicking hollowly against the marble floors, the rhythm of his steps off-kilter with the faint music he could still hear from above.  At the far end of the room, behind an inconspicuous door, was a servants' staircase that led up through the theater and to the roof.  He could get backstage and find Mozart without being seen by the Viennese who were crowded into the theater above.

He unlatched the door, letting the music spill out over him like a shaft of light, and peered up the length of the spiral staircase.  The dim flicker of candlelight, the excited whisper of the troupe above, and, engulfing it all, that music.  Wolfgang was up there somewhere, the secrets of what Salieri had done ready to spill out of him at any moment.

He lifted a heavy brass candlestick off a side table, weighing it in his hand as he curled his fingers around it.  Blunt, but efficient.

Salieri adjusted his mask with his free hand and crept up the stairs, leaving the underground ballroom behind.

 

* * *

 

Constance threw back her head, her fingers twisting in Clara's hair as she worked her way down her collar to her breast.  Her warm breath and hot tongue danced across Constance's skin, nipping here, sucking there, sending currents of heat through her veins, drawing ragged gasps from her throat.  With her free hand she tugged her shift further down to expose even more skin to Clara's touch, arching her back.  She hadn't felt like this in years, not since the first time she and Wolfgang had fooled around at the Gods Eye while her mother and sisters were out calling on friends.  Clara pushed her the rest of the way onto her back as she finished unbuttoning Constance's waistcoat and untucked her shift from her breeches.  She let the shift bunch around her middle as she ran both hands up the length of her bare stomach, cupping her breasts and teasing a nipple with her tongue.  Constance caught her lip between her teeth but couldn't stifle a long, low moan.  She clenched her eyes shut, the cold slate tiles of the roof chilling her through her clothes and contrasting with the heat of Clara's mouth, the heat of her own pulse.

When Clara released one of her breasts and slid her fingertips down the length of Constance's torso to the front of her breeches, she finally opened her eyes and caught her wrist in one hand.

Clara lifted her head and fixed her dark eyes on Constance.  Her lips were still parted, her expression hazy.  "Too much?"

"I just-" Constance began, breathless.  She propped herself up on her elbows and nodded awkwardly toward Clara.  "Don't you want me to- to do something?  I could try to-"

Clara interrupted her with a kiss, her soft, warm lips brushing teasingly over Constance's.  She was grinning when she pulled away.  "The only thing I want you to do," she said, her hands perching on Constance's hips, "is to take off these breeches, wrap these thighs around my head, and tell me what feels good."

Constance swore, slumping weakly back against the roof as Clara kissed the exposed skin beneath her navel and began unfastening her breeches.  She threaded her fingers into Clara's hair again, letting her eyes roll closed.  But just as the first gust of her hot breath permeated the silk breeches, just as one of her hands was sliding up the inside of her thigh and Constance found herself twitching in burning anticipation of finally, finally being touched after so long, the door to the stairwell burst open.

Constance sat up so quickly that her chin nearly cracked into the top of Clara's head.  She twisted awkwardly, crossing a protective arm over her bare chest and trying to slide her legs off Clara's shoulders without kicking her even as she craned her neck toward the door, her heart racing.  She expected to meet the knowing grin of one of the women, maybe even Aloysia herself; she expected to hear a quick apology and for the intruder who had joined them on the roof to retreat and leave them to finish what they had started.  She expected to be embarrassed at having been caught in such a ridiculous position, but secretly a little proud that she was finally worthy of becoming a real member of Aloysia's order.

She did not expect to see her own husband standing in the open doorway, his mournful brown eyes ringed with dark circles, his hair more unkempt than usual, his own clothing nearly as askew as Constance's.  Constance scrambled to her feet, self-consciously tugging her borrowed clothes into place and positioning herself in front of Clara as though she expected to be able to hide her completely.  "Wolfgang!" she panted, "I- I can explain!"

"Constance?" he said, his voice so low it sounded hoarse.  Despite everything, despite the weeks with no word, despite the scene Nannerl had discovered at Herr Salieri's house, despite the way Clara's touch had awakened a heat she hadn't felt in years, Constance's traitorous, gullible heart leaped at the sound of his voice.  She felt a flush come over her again.  It was so much easier to be angry at him when he was missing.  Wolfgang's brow was puckered as his glassy gaze drifted back and forth between the two of them.  "Constance.  I was looking for you.  Uh- good evening, Frau Rosenberg."

She felt one of Clara's hands at the small of her back and leaned against it.  An array of responses crowded together in her mind, ranging from the sarcastic sort of thing Aloysia would say to the practical reprimand she could imagine Clara would have offered up.  But at the sight of him, at the sight of her foolish, bedraggled husband who had lied to her, who had betrayed their marriage, who had abandoned her at her mother's boarding house in a bed the two of them should have been sharing, her strongest urge was to throw herself into his arms and to beg him to let things go back to what they had once been.

And yet, she knew her husband.  She knew that hollow look in his brown eyes, the defeated slump of his shoulders.  Figaro's failure hadn't just shaken him: it had broken through the foundation on which he had built his life.  Himself.  Their marriage didn't fit him anymore, did it?  Constance didn't fit the person he had become.  She took a step back, pulling Clara's arm around her waist as she did.  Wolfgang had been Constance's foundation for too long.  It was time to rebuild.

"Constance?"

She inhaled sharply and steadied herself.  "Nannerl told me where you were," she said firmly.  "I'd rather you stay with him.  Mother isn't going to let you move back into the Gods Eye."

"Constance, I really am sorry.  I thought you knew.  I tried to show you.  The club- I took you so you'd understand."

"That doesn't make it my responsibility, Wolfgang!  Your affair isn't my fault!"

"No, Constance, of course it isn't.  I never- I never meant that."

"What did you mean, then?"

He shook his head.  "I don't know."  He paced away from the door and dropped to a seat beneath one of the stooped gargoyles, covering his face in his hands and leaning his head back against the beast's stone wing.

Constance gripped Clara's arm.  For so many years, it had been her role to rush to Wolfgang's side when he was like this, to wrap her arms around him and murmur words of sweet encouragement until she saw his smile again.  It didn't seem fair to reduce him to this state herself and to stand by while he struggled, alone for the first time.

When he drew a ragged inhale, Constance felt as though he had taken the breath right out of her own lungs.  She stepped toward him only to be pulled back by Clara.  She spun around in her arms to reprimand her, to remind her that Wolfgang was still her husband no matter what he had done, but Clara was not looking at Wolfgang.  She inclined her head toward the doorway, where a dark, masked figure had appeared.  

That was all it took: the pity that had filled Constance's heart was flushed away in a wave of rage.  The man in black, the man with whom Wolfgang had slipped away all those nights at the underground ball.  His lover.  Of course Wolfgang wasn't coming back to her.  He had come to apologize, to ease his own guilt, and then he was going back to Herr Salieri's bed, leaving Constance all over again.

Constance worked the ring off her finger and hurled it at her husband.  It caught him on the back of one hand and bounced away, rolling right over the edge of the roof.  Just like that, it was gone.  

 

* * *

 

None of the whispering dancers darting about the wings had paid any heed to Salieri when he ascended from the abandoned ballroom.  He had ducked behind a clumsily-painted backdrop to avoid being spotted by Signora Lange, who was sweeping about in a glimmering dress with a distant look on her face, her eyes turning first toward the pit, then toward a closed door on the other side of the staircase.  Just as Salieri was debating the consequences of approaching her to find out how much she knew, Wolfgang himself had appeared.  He had exchanged a few words with a visibly impatient Signora Lange, who had pointed at the staircase from which Salieri had just come.  Salieri had pressed himself into the backdrop, holding his breath.  Had she seen him arrive after all?  Was she telling Wolfgang that he was here?

But no, Wolfgang had nodded absently at her and begun ascending the staircase, making his way toward the roof.  Salieri looked down at the candlestick in his hand.  The roof.  No prying eyes, no attentive ears.  It was perfect.  

After Wolfgang vanished, Signora Lange reached out a tentative hand and let her fingertips rest against one of the bolts on the door she had been glaring at, but hurried away without drawing it.  Salieri took advantage of the moment to dart back over to the staircase.  He took the steps gingerly, hoping that his dark clothes made him inconspicuous as he followed Wolfgang up and out of the theater, away from the swell of otherworldly music, away from the all-encompassing opera.

The access door was open when he reached the highest stair.  Salieri hesitated.  The roof was long and flat, the edges framed with battered-looking gargoyles: in the middle of it stood Wolfgang's seething wife.  She was dressed in men's clothes, though the shift was untucked and the jacket was askew.  The wind had caught the clothes and her long, loose hair; her jaw and her eyes were hard with rage.  She was more Greek Fury than the woman he had seen scampering around the Burgtheater all those years ago.  He didn't even notice Signora Rosenberg standing behind her until she pulled the wife back and nodded toward Salieri.

They locked eyes for a moment, this desperate woman and Salieri.  Her stare was sharp and unflinching, an unspoken accusation.  And then a fire was lit behind her eyes and she flung something across the roof at Wolfgang, who was slumped in front of one of the gargoyles.  He yelped and leaped to his feet, following his wife's gaze until he, too, spotted Salieri in the doorway.

A flush crept through Salieri's body as that stupid bright look came into Mozart's eyes again.  He pressed the candlestick against the side of his leg, shooting a sideways glance at the women.  He hadn't imagined that there would be witnesses up here.  He hadn't considered that getting rid of Wolfgang meant leaving behind a widow.

"You're here," Wolfgang breathed.  He even looked as though he might smile right there in front of his wife.  

Salieri took a step back, unsure what to say, unwilling to trust his thoughts.  The world had been knocked off-kilter, and Wolfgang was behind it.  Everything would be put right again once he was gone, once Mozart was gone.  He had to do this.

A shadow crossed Wolfgang's face but he moved closer, tentative.  "When we parted ways this morning, I wasn't sure where the memories would die.  These past few weeks..."  He took another step forward, gesturing to his wife.  "The life I had before- it's slipped away already.  Like a sigh."

He was close now, close enough that Salieri could see a film of sweat on his forehead, could see that the corners of his eyes were wet.  He lifted his arm reflexively, the base of the heavy candlestick catching Wolfgang in the chest, holding him at bay.  Wolfgang looked down at it, then back up at Salieri, his large eyes traveling up the length of his body, the light draining out of his eyes as he studied Salieri's expression.

"You're never going to let us be happy, are you?" he asked.  "This- this persona you've built, the role you think you fulfill in society... no matter what we have, no matter-" he ran his fingers up the length of the candlestick until they met Salieri's- "no matter how well we fit, how good we are together... you won't let go of it."

Salieri pushed the candlestick harder against Wolfgang's chest, gripping it tighter as his hand began to shake beneath Wolfgang's.

"Antonio, last night-"

"It didn't happen!" Salieri snapped.  His voice was thin in his ears; he could feel the women's eyes on him like a weight.  "Nothing you think happened between us means anything now, don't you understand?  Just because you insist on clinging to- to the last thread of your twisted desires!"

With that, Mozart's eyes went dim.  He stepped back at last, releasing Salieri's hand and leaving him brandishing the trembling candlestick.  There was a tear in the front of his shirt where it had caught on a bit of filigree, exposing a narrow swathe of his bare chest.  "But it was only yesterday," he murmured faintly.  He looked over toward his wife, then back at Salieri again, and took another step backward.  "It was only yesterday that you and I- that you finally stopped pretending.  Antonio?"

Salieri gritted his teeth and said nothing.

"Constance?"

"How dare you try to bring her into this!" Signora Rosenberg hissed before Mozart's wife could speak.  "You left behind a family who loves you for this man?"

"I... I thought..." Wolfgang stammered, but then he shook his head, his mournful gaze on Salieri again.

He couldn't find the strength to finish what he had started.  The four of them held their positions for a long moment, so still that Salieri could make out a whispering melody from the deviants' opera that was raging below.  Wolfgang's face had gone entirely blank.  His eyes were glassy.

He suddenly fixed his empty stare on the women, crossing his hands over his heart, over the rip left by Salieri's candlestick.  "You'll take care of her, won't you, Frau Rosenberg?"

"Better than you have," answered Signora Rosenberg darkly, while Mozart's wife asked, "Wolfi?  What do you mean?"

Wolfgang dropped into a low bow, then faced Salieri.  He took another step back.  "Antonio," he said solemnly.  "My maestro... we could have written such harmonies."

Salieri tightened his grip on the candlestick, that same indignant heat overcoming him, but he couldn't find the words to silence him.  He simply stood there, helpless, returning Wolfgang's dark, bottomless stare while his half-drafted plans swirled around his thoughts.  Poison, asphyxiation, a few sharp blows to the skull with this candlestick--why hadn't he been able to carry out any of them?  Why was he letting Mozart endanger his career, destroy everything he was?  The earth had spun off its axis.

Wolfgang bowed just as he had done to his wife.  When he looked up, his expression was strange.  Distant.  As otherworldly as his sister's music.  "We'll meet again," he said vaguely, "and none of this will matter anymore.  But for now-" he spread his arms, taking another step back- "for now, I can only ask that you accept the regrets of a betrayed, humiliated man."

It wasn't until the wife screamed, "Wolfgang!" and broke free of Signora Rosenberg's arm that Salieri realized that Wolfgang's heels were hanging over the edge of the roof.  Arms outstretched, Wolfgang Mozart took one more step into the empty space above the street and he let himself fall.


	15. SOS d'un terrien en détresse

The crowd was chanting the name Mozart, and for the first time, it didn't belong to Wolfgang.

Nannerl waited, arms aloft, until the roar tapered off and she could count in the next scene.  She gritted her teeth and shot the flutist a final stern look before she summoned the riskiest song in her opera.  This was nothing less than a moment of truth.  The audience could still turn on her.

Before the applause had broken out, Aloysia as the marquise had declared war on Caterina as the viscount.  Now it was time for the duel scene, and for the last aria.  This had been a difficult moment to write.  In the preceding act, the viscount had tried to use a good woman to achieve his own ends, and, without even realizing what was happening, he had fallen in love with her.  Deep in his own denial and his conviction that he was in control, he had thrown her out and the poor woman had died of grief.  Her death had undone the viscount.  Now he was devastated and destructive, staggering forward to duel with a chevalier he had wronged with no intention of coming out of the confrontation alive.

Nannerl had had no idea how to approach this last and most crucial scene.  The rest had fallen together easily: conquests, wicked friendships, and bored aristocrats were things she knew all too well, but heartbreak?  The deepest losses Nannerl had ever felt were those of her parents, and that old, dull pain was nothing compared to the shame and despair that had to be consuming the viscount after he drove his love to her death.  Nannerl hadn't known where to begin.

It had been Caterina who had made the suggestion only a day ago.  The two of them had been wound together in her bed, Nannerl's ear pressed to Caterina's heart, Caterina's fingers twining through Nannerl's hair, when suddenly she had said, "What if you let me sing our song at the end?"

Their song, the love song Nannerl had composed against Caterina's skin.  It was a song with an ache to it, but an ache of longing rather than an ache of loss.  Nannerl had said, "But the viscount wants to die.  Why would he sing about love?"

And Caterina had answered, "Because even as it destroys him, it's his love that consumes him.  Because even as he dies, even as the blade pierces his heart, that heart isn't his."

"And you won't mind if it's our song?  If we set Herr Stephanie's tragic words to our melody?"

"Even the bleakest words can't make our melody tragic," Caterina had said with her sly smile.

Now, here she stood on the stage in that form-fitting suit with her prop sword raised in one hand and their song on her lips, and Nannerl's hands shook at the majesty of it. 

_Zu hilfe! Ich brauche Liebe!_

She could feel the heavy stares of the audience behind her, could hear the sharp hiss of breath as it became clear that the viscount was ready to die, could sense the tension as Caterina looked her opponent in the eye and slowly let her sword fall from trembling hand.  When she reached the end of the crescendo and the chevalier thrust her sword beneath Caterina's arm, someone in the audience cried out.  There were a few nervous titters, but mostly she could hear shallow sighs as Caterina sank to the ground, throwing a tiny wink in Nannerl's direction before she closed her eyes.

The audience burst into shrieks and cheers even before the curtain had begun to fall.  Her shoulders slumped in relief, Nannerl blew a kiss at Caterina and turned her back on the stage once more.  She was met with a forest of waving arms, hats and handkerchiefs fluttering through the air with frantic energy, with her name on every tongue.  She pressed her hands over her burning cheeks, unable to force the smile off her face.  They had loved it!  They had understood her music, they had seen past her makeshift orchestra, past the homemade backdrops and the borrowed props and they had seen what Nannerl Mozart could do.  She stood up on the bench, putting herself just higher than the crowd, and dropped into a quick curtsy.  At that they somehow they managed to be even more raucous than before.

She heard a shout from behind her and turned in time to see Constance flinging aside the curtain and vaulting off the stage, throwing herself into the crowd and forcing her way through to the exit, Clara in her wake.  Nannerl pursed her lips, wondering what senseless thing her brother could have said to upset his poor wife now.  She supposed it was too much to ask that on this night, the night of the premier of Nannerl's first opera, Wolfgang could let her have the spotlight for a few hours and support her the way she had always supported him.  Had he even congratulated her when they had spoken during the entr'acte?  Had he even realized what his sister had managed to accomplish here?

Behind her, the orchestra began a reprise of the viscount's last aria, signalling the beginning of the curtain call:  _Zu hilfe! Ich brauche Liebe!_

Nannerl crossed her hands over her heart and bowed to the audience once more before she turned back around.  Her lovely friends filed onto the stage in their homemade costumes, Aloysia at the center as she always was, and Nannerl felt the first prick of tears behind her eyes.  In her heart, she was still the girl who had spent her life in her father's shadow, whose only real friend was the housekeeper her father paid to keep an eye on her.  Yet in just a few months of being on her own, she had done all this! 

None of it would have been possible without Aloysia, without the women of the underground order.  Nannerl caught Aloysia's eye and blew her a kiss with both hands.  But there was a grim set to Aloysia's mouth.  She caught her lip between her teeth, her well-shaped brows drawn together, and tilted her head toward the wings, mouthing something Nannerl couldn't understand.

The audience had begun chanting her name once again, and the women were gesturing for her to take a bow as well.  Nannerl stepped down from the bench; no sooner had her feet touched the ground when the women reached down to pull her onto the stage with them, arms encircling her from every direction, grateful kisses landing on her cheeks and hands.  How warm it was up here!  She bowed again--would this crowd ever settle down?--and slipped an arm around Aloysia's waist, then looked for Caterina.  Her large blue eyes and well-tailored breeches were nowhere to be seen: her little diva was not among the performers.    It was unlike her to miss a cue, even if it was only for curtain call.  Perhaps the warm air up here had been too much for her.  She must have gone back to claim the changing room before the others left the stage.

The noise of the audience sounded more like shouting now; arms that had been waving handkerchiefs were now gesturing wildly at the stage.  Nannerl wiped a film of sweat from her brow and turned to Aloysia to ask how she could stand to perform in such heat when above the voices of the crowd she heard someone scream, "Fire!"

Then a hundred voices were shrieking, the mass of people shifting toward the doors at the back of the room, even the members of her orchestra melting into the frantic crowd.  It wasn't until she saw Tatiana and Benedikta helping each other off the stage as well that Nannerl turned to look over her shoulder, following the terrorized glances she kept seeing from the audience.

Their backdrop, a lovely Parisian street that the women had painted themselves, was curdling and bubbling as a tongue of flame spread along one corner of the sheet.  In the few seconds it took her to realize what she was seeing, the fire blossomed into a pillar, easily catching the ropes and riggings and even the musty old curtains.  Their stage was burning!

"Nannerl!  Come on!" Aloysia hissed, her iron grip closing around Nannerl's arm as she dragged her back down to the pit and into the stampeding audience.  Benches that had only moments ago been filled with her adoring public were toppled and askew, masks and hats and shawls dotted wherever they had been left in the scramble to escape before the fire spread beyond the stage.  They were forced to pause before they reached the door: the room had been packed far beyond capacity, and only one or two people could fit through each exit at a time.  The cries of terror were overwhelming as the people pushed and trampled each other in their impatience.

Nannerl turned back to face the stage, a cold weight on her heart.  The trail of flames had crept along the boards and was leaning toward the pit, toward the harpsichord from which she had conducted her own opera moments ago, the bench upon which she had stood while the Viennese people screamed her name.  Was this punishment for trying to reach too far above her station?  Was this a glimpse at the devil's own hell that awaited an ungrateful daughter who had disobeyed her father's dying wishes?

The jam at the door seemed to be clearing at last, and the crowd at the back of the room was beginning to thin.  Aloysia was still gripping her arm, holding her so tightly that Nannerl was sure she would bruise.  But as she wrenched her toward the door, Nannerl remembered the sweet face that had been missing during curtain call and pulled her back.  "Aloysia," she called, "where's Caterina?"

The color drained from Aloysia's face and she shot a desperate look at the burning stage.  The flames were beginning to creep along the roof now, ashes raining down on the empty benches and gray smoke filling the theater.  Suddenly, Aloysia shrieked, a cry that sounded like, "The door!" and she threw herself toward the flames, dropping Nannerl's arm at last.

But Nannerl gathered her skirts in her arms and followed her, a realization sinking into her stomach: Caterina was still backstage.

The smoke stung at her eyes as she scrambled back up over the lip of the stage.  Aloysia was already on the other side of a strip of flame that was all the was left of their backdrop.  Nannerl cursed her gauzy dress and unwieldy skirt as she hurled herself through a narrow gap, a wave of heat washing over her and receding as she passed into the wings.  Where was Aloysia now?  The stacks of props and costumes were all ablaze, tongues of flame curling through the air everywhere she looked, looming shadows flickering across the soot-stained walls.  The heat in the air seemed to rip the very breath from her lungs.

A hazy figure stepped out from behind a burning stack of boxes, and in her confusion Nannerl started to run toward it, only to stop short.  It was a man in black, his features hidden by a plain mask, a heavy candlestick clutched in his hand.  Nannerl knew him at once.   What was he doing here?  Where was Wolfgang?  She tried to call to him, but even as she opened her mouth she saw him swing the candlestick at a sconce.  It clattered to the floor, a candle tipping free of the base, its tiny yellow flame brushing the old wall and burning bright, brighter.  Nannerl looked from the broken sconce to the fire that was raging around him, and another cold realization took hold.  Here was Wolfgang's lover, the author of Le relazione pericolose, and he was burning down the theater around the deviants' opera that had upstaged him.  She heard herself cry out, her voice smothered by the roar of flames, and even as she prepared to launch herself at him Salieri turned and spotted her.  

Nannerl stood frozen under his wild gaze, the tears in her eyes hot as the fire that surrounded them both.  Then the heavy candlestick slipped out of Salieri's hand and he sank to his knees.

A hand closed over her arm again; Aloysia had reappeared at her side, ash smeared across her perfect face, her dark eyes round.  Her lips were moving, but it took Nannerl a moment to hear her saying, "It's too late!  The fire- it's too late!" as she attempted to wrest her toward the exit once more.

"Caterina!" Nannerl insisted, pulling free despite Aloysia's pleas and charging toward the dressing room without so much as a second glance toward the wretch who had set her opera ablaze.

The fire here seemed to have already burned out and moved on, leaving behind mounds of white ash and black scorch marks where an hour ago there had been whispering dancers warming up for the second act.  The door to the dressing room was enshrouded in a thick wall of smoke, and though its edges were charred it was still intact.  Nannerl shouted Caterina's name again and threw herself into the smoke, heedless of whatever Aloysia was saying behind her.

The latch was glowing orange against the charred wood of the door: it had been drawn from the outside.  Nannerl threw a dark look over her shoulder at Aloysia before she fell upon it, the metal burning her hands at the first touch.  She swiped the back of her arm across her brow and grimaced at the sight of the angry red skin on her fingertips.  It took wrapping part of her uppermost petticoat around her hand to eventually work the scalding lock free.  

But the inside of the dressing room was an inferno, a vortex of angry orange flames that burst into freedom the moment Nannerl opened the door.  She heard a scream and felt Aloysia's arms encircle her waist, dragging her away as a shower of embers caught the front of her skirts.  While Aloysia was knelt before her, pawing gracelessly at her dress to extinguish it, Nannerl could not take her eyes off the dressing room where Caterina had been trapped.  "Please-" Aloysia was saying, "we can't stay here, the roof-!" But the words meant nothing to Nannerl.

Even as the fire that had been contained in the dressing room bloomed out into the wings, even as Aloysia seized Nannerl about the waist again and lifted her off the ground, Nannerl was staring at the long scratches in the dressing room door.  Fingernail marks.  She was staring at the wood around the latch where the scratches were the deepest, where the grooves in the wood were stained brown with baked blood.  She was staring at the backside of an unyielding door, the last thing Caterina must have seen as the flames consumed her.

She didn't struggle as Aloysia half-carried her out of the theater, as they passed the burning benches where her audience had been, as the flames reached the enormous chandelier and it came crashing down behind them, bringing part of the roof with it.  The roar of the burning theater receded in her ears, replaced by a snatch of music that was looping mercilessly in her head.

_Zu hilfe! Ich brauche Liebe!_

Listless, ash-smeared faces were huddled in groups out in the street, glassy eyes watching as the Public Forces arrived with their wagons and their pumps, too little and far too late.  Aloysia was saying "I'm sorry" over and over, tears streaking white paths down her cheeks, slumped upon the cobbles and clinging to Nannerl as though she might never let her go.

A light rain had begun, another insult on top of everything else.  Nannerl pressed her burnt fingertips against the slick cobbles and unwound Aloysia's arms from her waist.  

"It's my fault," Aloysia was saying, though her face was buried in Nannerl's lap, her voice muffled by her singed skirts.  "It's all my fault."

Nannerl caught Aloysia's head in her hands and pulled her upright, studying her with a numb, detached sort of interest.  Where was the perfect doll who had flirted with her over the Webers' dinner table now?  Where was the icy reserve, the cool confidence she had exuded each time she pinned Nannerl to a pew at the back of the ruined church?

"I only wanted a moment alone to tell you I went to see Salieri this morning!  I don't know what I was thinking!  But every time I tried to warn you, Cavalieri-"

Nannerl shoved her away before she could finish.

"I was going to let her out after we talked," Aloysia insisted.  "Please, if I could have known, I never would have-"

"How did Salieri know we would be here tonight?" Nannerl asked.  When Aloysia didn't answer, Nannerl rose to her feet and moved away.

A group of their friends were standing over by the wagons, Tatiana sobbing into Zahera's neck.  There was a roar in her ears as she approached them.

"You see, my lady?" Zahera was saying, smoothing her hand through Tatiana's hair.  "Here she is, here's our little genius."  Meeting Nannerl's eye, she said, "She was afraid someone had been hurt.  We didn't see you or Aloysia after-"

"Caterina," Nannerl whispered, and she turned away before she had to see understanding in Zahera's dark eyes.

Nannerl could feel the weight of a dozen stares as she drifted around the perimeter of the burning mansion, each footstep echoing in her skull.  Her audience, she thought grimly as a pair of heads swiveled in her direction, pity etched into their unfamiliar faces.  Every time she swallowed, she choked back the wave of despair that was building up within her, that was tugging at the corners of her mouth and pricking at her eyes.  All the while, the refrain of their song was pounding away in her mind:

_Zu hilfe! Ich brauche Liebe!_

She could hear someone sobbing as she rounded another corner, a devastating sound Nannerl knew she would hear again tonight when she was alone in her empty bed.  She cast a hollow glance up at the shell of the old mansion, the fire glowing merrily behind each window as it consumed the rest of the house and licked at the night sky above.

When she lowered her gaze again, she found herself facing Clara, their director, a thin woman with red lips and short hair who was wringing her hands and looking unhappily around the street.  Beyond her a man was seated directly upon the cobbles, his mask pushed up atop his head and a stricken expression on his face.  As she drew closer, she recognized him as their librettist.

There was some sort of blanket lying in the road, and atop it was sprawled Constance.  She was the source of the sobbing Nannerl had heard, clutching the old blanket and weeping into it as though her heart was broken.  Nannerl started to approach her, but she saw the warning written in Clara and Stephanie's eyes, and then she saw a lifeless hand protruding from beneath one corner of the blanket.

There were not many men that Nannerl would have recognized by their hands, but this hand--this was a hand she had held before countless recitals, knuckles she had kissed after composing so many lullabies, fingers she had watched dance over hundreds of keyboards.  This was the hand of her brother, prone and lifeless, never to write again. 

Wolfgang was dead. 

She sagged to the ground, heedless of the wet cobbles and the pitying stares of Clara and Stephanie.

_Zu hilfe! Ich brauche Liebe!_

Beneath Constance's arms she could just make out the shape of her brother's shoulders beneath the blanket, of his head, and the thought struck her that she was the last Mozart on earth.

She extended one arm, letting her fingertips brush over his upturned palm, recoiling when she found that his flesh was turning cold as the cobbles that were digging into her knees.

"Was it- the fire?" she asked haltingly.  Had Antonio Salieri's jealousy killed the last member of her family and the woman she loved at the same time?

Constance moaned, her face muffled in the blanket that covered Wolfgang's unmoving chest.

"He- he fell," stammered the librettist, but Clara interrupted him.

"He jumped."  Her voice was flat and hard.

Jumped.

Constance lifted her head, her eyes red and cheeks slick with tears.  She scrubbed at her face with both palms and turned to Nannerl as though she would say something, but then someone behind her cleared his throat and a shadow passed across Constance's face.

Nannerl looked up: a small man in fine velvet clothes was standing uncomfortably by, both hands resting on a walking stick that was nearly as tall as he was.  He cleared his throat again, peering down through his spectacles at Nannerl.

"I'm not going home with you!" Clara blurted, kneeling at Constance's side and folding her into her arms.  "I can't leave Conrad alone, not now."

Constance closed her eyes, letting her head fall onto Clara's shoulder.  Her blond curls were clinging limply to her cheeks and forehead, soaked through by the rain.  The blanket that was covering Wolfgang's body was so wet that Nannerl could nearly make out the features of his familiar face.

His face--would she ever see her little brother's face again?

The gentleman cleared his throat a third time, shooting a disdainful glance at Clara.  "Actually, my dear, I'm not here for you," he said, his voice pinched.  His haughty gaze lingering on the librettist, then on Wolfgang's body, and finally came back to rest on Nannerl.  "Did you compose Gefährliche Liebschaften?"

Nannerl forced herself to rise though she could hardly feel her legs.  "I did."

"Hm," the gentleman said with a sharp nod.  "Come with me."

A black carriage was waiting in a side street.  Its driver was masked and anonymous, though his dark clothes were as fine as the little gentleman Nannerl was following.  The horses were the same glossy black as the carriage itself.  Someone had taken such pains to appear inconspicuous that the effort itself made their carriage stand out.

The gentleman held open the door and inclined his head, gesturing for Nannerl to get in.

The thought crossed her mind that he could be one of Salieri's friends from the palace sent to dispose of her.  With her opera aflame and her brother dead, with Caterina burned to ash and the underground order scattered, what would be left of Gefährliche Liebschaften if Nannerl too disappeared?  What would stop Salieri's own opera from achieving glory?

The thoughts came and went, and Nannerl climbed into the carriage anyway.  If she had never written Gefährliche Liebschaften, if she had never been so desperate for a renown she didn't deserve, Caterina would still be alive.

There was a man sitting in the carriage, his head and shoulders enshrouded in a somber mask.  Nannerl took the seat facing him, and the little gentleman climbed in behind, firmly closing the door and lowering the shade.

"This is the composer?" the masked man asked.  His voice was too bright for their grim surroundings.

The gentleman only pursed his lips and lit a taper.

"Rosenberg, this is a woman," the masked man pointed out.

"My name is Maria Anna Mozart," Nannerl said, unsure whether her tone was sharp enough to pierce through the haze that had settled over her heart.  "Gefährliche Liebschaften is my work.  So if Salieri sent you to abduct me-"

The masked man let out a merry laugh even as a gasp hissed between the gentleman's teeth.  "Abduct you?  Dear lady, no!"

"Perhaps-" the little gentleman mumbled, gesturing to his own face.

"Oh!  Of course!" chuckled the masked man, and when he swept the mask away from his head Nannerl seized the little gentleman's arm in surprise.  Here was a round, jolly face she had seen in paintings and on coins, but had never imagined she would see in a shadowy carriage outside a burning building.  She was speaking to the emperor of Austria.

Nannerl tipped forward in her seat, unsure how to bow when they were sitting face-to-face in his carriage.  The few times she had allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to meet the emperor, she had pictured herself arriving at the palace in her finest dress, surrounded by attendants and supporters as she reverently approached the throne.  Instead, she sat before him with an ash-smeared face, bedraggled hair, and a numb void inside her chest.  The front of her skirts had been partially burned away when she had opened the dressing room door, leaving a singed layer of tulle dotted with the occasional scrap of twisted wire that had once been a glimmering blue butterfly.  She dropped her gaze to the remains of a feathery wing and found herself thinking again of the deep scratches she had seen in the back of the wooden door.  She wondered if anyone had ever been sick on the emperor's gilded shoes before.

"I had the pleasure of attending your opera tonight," the emperor of Austria was saying.  "Intendant Rosenberg here advised me that all of Vienna was talking about it, and since it is the final night of my festival, well, I felt it was my duty to see what this was all about.  In disguise, of course," he added with a wide grin.

"Your Majesty, the, uh, theater-"

"Yes, yes, alright," the emperor interrupted, shooting the intendant an impatient look.  "Yes, of course, my condolences, young lady, on the damage your little theater sustained."

Nannerl nodded, looking down at his glimmering shoes again.

"Despite the rather dramatic finale, however, I find I have no choice but to declare Gefährliche Liebschaften the best opera yet written."

Nannerl's gaze snapped up to his face; the gentleman at her side let out a harrumph so loud it might as well have been one of the horses.  "Your Majesty, surely you don't mean-"

"Rosenberg!"

"Apologies," the intendant mumbled.  He fixed a dark stare on Nannerl, his lip practically curling.

"As you must know, I decreed that I would offer my open Kapellmeister position to the author of the greatest opera performed during my festival."

"Kapellmeister?" Nannerl repeated hoarsely.  "But your Majesty-"

"She's a woman, your Majesty!"

"And?  Would you have the emperor go back on his word before all his subjects?  Everyone knows that her opera was the best."

Rosenberg spluttered indignantly, only falling silent when the emperor glared at him again.

The emperor held out his hands, presenting Nannerl with an ornate medal that gleamed in the flickering light of Rosenberg's taper.  "So, my dear?  Will you accept the position of imperial Kapellmeister?"

Here was a moment she hadn't even dared dream could come to pass, and Nannerl felt like she was watching it happen from outside her body, from above the carriage, from atop the burning mansion.  She imagined her father's eyes on her, her mother's--her brother's.  Caterina's.  It settled heavily over her shoulders and her heart.

Kapellmeisterin, the first female Kapellmeister in Austria.  In the known world.  Kapellmeisterin Mozart.  Would her father have been proud?  How could he have been, when his only son lay dead in the street beyond the carriage door?

Nannerl took the medal mechanically. Her hand dipped under the weight of it.  Then the emperor crowed some sort of congratulation as the intendant opened the carriage door again and ushered Nannerl out, his lips pressed together so tightly that they were turning white.

On the other side of the street, Constance was weeping again with her face buried in Clara's chest.  A group of soldiers were clustered nearby, two of them loading Wolfgang's body onto a cart while another was locking a pair of manacles around the wrists of Antonio Salieri.  As for Salieri himself, he was staring hollowly at the cart, watching them take Wolfgang away with the same slack expression Nannerl had fixed upon the emperor when he had named her Kapellmeister.

Beyond the soldiers, most of the public officials had given up trying to save the old mansion and were focusing instead on preventing the fire from spreading to any neighboring buildings.  People were struggling with pumps and buckets everywhere she looked.  At the curb, Aloysia was surrounded by the members of their order, her face scrubbed dry and blank and a hard set to her jaw.  The light of the fire glowed orange in her shimmery dress.

A shout went up; a handful of members of the Public Forces emerged from the grand entryway at a run, crying out and gesturing for everyone in the street to move back.  No sooner had they cleared the building than the groans of failing timbers could be heard over the roar of the fire, and slowly the roof gave way, crashing down into the burning shell of a mansion and sending up a column of sparks and flame that eclipsed the stars.

Nannerl weighed the medal the emperor had given her in her palm and found herself unable to tear her eyes away from it.  Around her, the rush of flames, the calling voices, and Constance's guttural sobs faded together, a senseless cacophony gnawing at her mind.  She thought of Caterina, of her plump thighs and her red lips as she stood on the stage and brought their song to life before the people of Vienna.  Before the emperor himself.  It was the last thing she had ever done.  Her vision blurred; a tear slipped from her cheek and onto the medal.

For the first time that evening, the music in her heart had gone silent.


End file.
